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Microsoft had a service in the mid-late 1990s which provided datacast services like traffic, weather and news blurbs to an ActiveX plugin on the Windows desktop
by emchammer 2y ago
Microsoft had a service in the mid-late 1990s which provided datacast services like traffic, weather and news blurbs to an ActiveX plugin on the Windows desktop on using this as a bearer. It required the right kind of PCI FM tuner card on your desktop PC. I think most people have given up on this now that everyone is expected to have Internet access on their phone. It's too bad, these kind of experiments were neat.
- hakfoo 2y agoI wonder if we're going to eventually lose institutional memory of the efficiency of broadcast systems. Today, the obvious answer for traffic data is to make it an on-demand "pull" service. So a million users means a million individual requests for the same data clogging the infrastructure, and a server and/or caching infrastructure ready to service one million requests scattered within the window of 7:30 to 8:30 AM. A broadcast "push" model would only need to make a few transmissions-- with effectively zero load balancing and distribution hardware-- to cover the same million users, and the client box would just listen and cache. A more ambitious idea might be caching CDN nodes-- potentially at the neighbourhood or single-customer level-- that were fed with popular data on a broadcast basis. Netflix pre-streams Episode 1 of every new series to your cable modem, so on "release day" there's a guaranteed smooth experience.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- johann8384 2y agoSome cable networks do have this sort of thing built in.The content of each channel on the wire is dynamic and adjusted based on what is to be sent. There is also regional and edge caching for on-demand type conte t.