Data Broadcasting International Ltd has emerged as the winning applicant for an Independent Television Commission data broadcasting licence after bidding UKP25,000 for the right to use three spare lines broadcast as part of the ITV television transmission signal. In the UK, terrestrial data broadcasting has been overshadowed by ever-increasing satellite freedom and resulting interest in VSAT, Very Small Aperture Terminal, installations. The company, originally operating under the name Aircall Teletext Ltd, has been operating a data broadcast service via the ITV Oracle teletext service since it was formed in 1985. It has proved to be a tough market.
Crippling
According to managing director Peter Rosenwald, fees that had to be paid to Oracle Teletext which actually fed the data to the ITV transmitter network, were crippling. On top of that, the company ploughed around UKP3m into the software needed to multiplex various clients’ data onto the single VBI, Vertical Blanking Interval, channel. But the most difficult part of the deal was the tiny volume of information that the company could carry. Before the new award, the single VBI channel provided an effective data capacity of 16Kbps. This measly allocation meant that the company spent much of its time husbanding precious resource and calculating how to get the best returns from the least bandwidth. Also, the problems were compounded by uncertainty over the last 18 months as to whether Data Broadcasting would retain its franchise. The auction of the ITV teletext and data broadcasting services worked in exactly the same way as that of the ITV stations – except that it was based solely on the amount bid, with no ‘quality threshold’. It was very difficult to sell the service to customers when we could not promise them that we would have anything after this summer says Rosenwald. In the end, Data Broadcasting was the only bidder and its UKP25,000 contribution to the UK Treasury’s coffers bought an exclusive 10-year licence. So why was it the only applicant? Difficult to say, says Rosenwald, who believes that at least 12 companies were interested enough to get details from the Independent Television Commission.
The UK now has by far the most open telecommunications market in the developed world, and has always been at the forefront when it came to developing new means of transmitting speech, text and data – remember Teletext, Viewdata, Telepoint are all British conceptions and Personal Communications Network grew out of the British government asking industry for new ideas to use a spare part of the spectrum. Problem is that all these competing technologies have arrived and have been generously licensed, which means that the less fancied ones, such as data broadcasting via Teletext, are apt to become Cinderallas. Chris Rose reports.
Possibly it was the esoteric nature of the technology, or that getting data to the transmitters via a distribution network costs up to UKP400,000 a year. Or perhaps they just didn’t think much of the potential profits. Nonetheless, the new regulations resolved some problems, and gone is the uncertainty and reliance on the ITV teletext operator to pump the data to the transmitter, while the addition of two VBI channels has bumped up capacity to around 48Kbps. Given the Gigabit-per-second world that we’re all heading for, this is miniscule, but Rosenwald believes its enough to enable his company to branch out. One of the problems that we have had as a company is that we couldn’t do any entrepreneurial stuff ourselves – we had to keep all of our capacity for our customers he comments, explaining that the company intends to become an information provider, rather than the mere network operator. But is there really a place for terrestrial data broadcasting alongside satellite? Rosenwald acknowledges that as satellite systems become smaller and cheaper, he will have a battle on his hands since the service is not particularly cheap. Customers like the Ladbroke and Mecca gaming chains were wooed by the fact that high-street branches can receive up-to-d
ate prices using a conventional television aerial and a decoder, and similar benefits have led The Guardian newspaper and the Royal National Institute for the Blind to design a news service for the visually impaired, which is due to go live at the end of the month. Users with personal computers will have the text downloaded to their machines overnight at a low data rate.
Audio menus In the morning they will be able to interrogate the machine using audio menus so that it will read out the stories of their choice. We have customers who pay as little as UKP50,000 a year, Rosenwald says, adding that a user that wanted to broadcast around 512Kb to 2Mb of text a day would be charged UKP20,000 a year plus site licensing and the capital cost of the remote decoders, which cost around UKP200. Not cheap, he agrees, but arguing that it is a mistake to look solely at price per bit since service accounts for a lot. Meanwhile, Oracle Teletext has lost its franchise to run the ITV service. It was outbid by Teletext UK Ltd, which is partly-owned by Associated Newspapers Plc. Teletext UK Ltd bid UKP8.2m, Oracle Teletext Ltd offered UKP6.7m, TV-am Cable Television Ltd came in at UKP6.4m, Carlton Communcations Plc & Intelfax offered UKP3.6m, while Update Teletext Ltd offered UKP3.6m.
