Texas' public broadcasters have selected Triveni Digital's SkyScaper datacasting systems to offer broadband services to the state's public educational and medical institutions. The agreement marks the first deployment of a statewide datacasting initiative across independent TV stations, according to Triveni.
The Texas Public Broadcasting Association plans to use SkyScraper for the Texas Public Broadcasting Education Network, a digital datacasting project spanning the state's 14 public television stations. Funded by the Texas Infrastructure Fund, the service is expected to roll out in the first half of 2003.
The SkyScraper system will allow broadcasters to leverage their inter-station high-speed structure with their individual DTV signals. SkyScraper powers the content delivery mechanism, which supports the wireless broadband distribution of digitized materials. The system is compatible with encoders, multiplexers and data encapsulators, so each station can select its own DTV equipment provider for their DTV plant implementation.
"Digitized content including files, folders and streaming media clips may be located anywhere, inside or outside of the TPBEN network, and delivered to edge storage devices throughout the state of Texas," said Dr. Rod Zent, director of educational broadcasting at Texas A&M University and principle investigator of the TPBEN project. The project targets students, teachers, libraries, schools, universities, healthcare entities and residents.
The SkyScraper system is composed of three sections: DataFab, which manages data content selection and scheduling; DataHub, which allocates bandwith to content providers and inserts their scheduled data in the broadcast stream; and DataReceiver, which extracts data from the broadcast stream for the end user.
