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From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein)
Newsgroups: net.news.stargate
Subject: Re: PBS
Message-ID: <575@vortex.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 22-Feb-85 17:10:54 EST
Article-I.D.: vortex.575
Posted: Fri Feb 22 17:10:54 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 27-Feb-85 02:43:55 EST
References: <336@idis.UUCP>
Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles
Lines: 28

I've talked to PBS in the past.  They are very desperate for
big bucks, and plan to be charging substantial money for what
they consider to be a very valuable financial data stream service.

That's the big problem with all these services, of course.  The
sort of data we want to send isn't very valuable in an absolute
money sense, so we couldn't have flown at all unless we found
someone willing to offer us very substantial bandwidth at 
bargain basement prices.  I guess the key here is that our carrier
is very "techie" oriented and not demanding a quickie return
-- unlike other people.  PBS has some unusual problems with which to
deal, by the way.  Among these are the facts that some of their
affiliates in major cities are already running their own local
news services over the vertical interval, and may be unwilling
to give them up without a fight.  Another problem (not so serious
for financial data, but bad news for other sorts of things) is
that many PBS affiliates are not 24 hour operations (KCET here in
L.A. is off most of the night, for example).  This will cut
into the total bandwidth rather substantially.  Of course, since financial
data runs during the day anyway, they should be able to manage.

By the way, I've been watching the decoder prices for the different
services.  So far, all of the mass-production vertical interval decoders
I've seen are in the $500-$700 range.  The new Stargate decoders
(which will hopefully become available in March) are at the very bottom
end of that range and are being mass-produced by Zenith.

--Lauren--