Casablanca: End of a glorious experiment

watty

So much for progress of the great "features" of Vista, IE7 and Firefox2, all of which seem to need more hardware to do the same thing less reliably. (Linux & Apple OS are suffering from this disease too, if you compare now to 1999)

Sat@Once newsletter number 108 (ENGLISH)
========================================

Wrapping up Sat@Once

---

Sat@Once will send its last package of free Internet contents next
Wednesday February 14, 2007, after almost 5 full years of free operation
for the Satellite Internet community (we started operations on 11 March
2002 with Casablanca version 1.2).

Many thanks to ASTRA for having given this much satellite capacity for
the benefits of the users. Many thanks to ESA for having co-funded the
project. Many thanks to all our partners who created mirror download web
sites, support forums and who participated in this project during this
past 5 years (an eternity in Internet time). Many thanks for the 200.000
+ persons who downloaded a copy of the software from the official web
site of CSP, not counting the unofficial mirror sites.


Why is Sat@Once stopped?

---

The purpose of Sat@Once was to prove the interest of using the satellite
to do webcasting of a set of most popular Internet web contents to a
multitude of users, filtered to suit individual topics of interests. On
this respect, Sat@Once is one of the most successful projects co-funded
by ASTRA and ESA.

With the advent of Windows VISTA, of Internet Explorer 7, of Firefox 2,
it is becoming too difficult for a small development team to follow the
changes. Therefore, we prefer to stop the service rather than provide a
bad service.

Eventually Sat@Once needs to be followed up by professional
broadcasters, commercial or public. It is not the mission of Sat@Once to
continue forever.


Is somebody taking over the service in Europe?

---

We will continue to make the Casablanca technology available to all
satellite operators in the world.

From the feedback, it appears that the interest is highest in countries
without solid terrestrial infrastructure. Casablanca shines when doing
podcasting because the same rich content can reach millions of users
simultaneously without any terrestrial lines. However, in Europe, major
podcasters have invested heavily in classical servers for classical
distribution and cannot change overnight to another technology before
they have proven their existing investment.

If you want Sat@once to continue, maybe with another operator, please
feel free to lobby your preferred podcaster, for example your national
TV channels who is already used to send over ASTRA.

See you soon and many thanks again from your Sat@Once Team.

---

mossym

i'd hardly blame evolving technology...there are plenty of free projects that because there is enough interest in keep progressing despite technology changes.

I've never used this, but it looks to me like it's more that there just wasn't enough interest to maintain it..if enough people were interestedin keeping it going i think it could have over some the hurdles..

just my 2 cents

talkingclock

watty wrote:

So much for progress of the great "features" of Vista, IE7 and Firefox2, all of which seem to need more hardware to do the same thing less reliably. (Linux & Apple OS are suffering from this disease too, if you compare now to 1999)



With the advent of Windows VISTA, of Internet Explorer 7, of Firefox 2,
it is becoming too difficult for a small development team to follow the
changes. Therefore, we prefer to stop the service rather than provide a
bad service.

We were talking about this yesterday at work and decided to close down as well

Nah, seriously, it's a pity! I've used it in the beginning, where you had only dead slow dial up connections. It was a great service!

watty

Over 50,000 people interested, but it was a free experiment. The SW team have just been having too much support grief when really they wanted to experiment with features.

The pod casts, newsgroup casting, SW downloads, video HIRES trailers etc was great as was sample selection of "pushed" Web pages.

Think "teletext" via Internet Push technology.. It showed what a HD satellite receiver Interactive Menu could be like too instead of NDS/BSkyB's/Thomson's "broken" proprietary misnamed "openTV"

watty

Can you imagine explaining this to

for example your national
TV channels

Bwahaahaa!!!!!!

mossym

out of interest, was it open source? given that they are offering it to providers i doubt it

but do you think going open source would have saved it?

have to admit it sounds cool

talkingclock

In Germany the second main national TV channel ZDF was pushing in the late 90s webpages with additional program related information via a gap in the teletext signal. it was called "intercast"

see: http://www.w3.org/Architecture/1998/06/Workshop/paper34/slides/sld004.htm

AdMMM

watty wrote:

Can you imagine explaining this to


Bwahaahaa!!!!!!

Actually, reading an article in todays Independant restored some of my faith into RTE. They are planning on digitising their entire archives and making them available on demand on their website. They've also started recording their shows with HD equipment but aren't ready to launch their HD platform just yet.

byte

|.Murderer.| wrote:

Actually, reading an article in todays Independant restored some of my faith into RTE. They are planning on digitising their entire archives and making them available on demand on their website. They've also started recording their shows with HD equipment but aren't ready to launch their HD platform just yet.

Their entire archive? Ooh, hope that comes to pass.

L1011

talkingclock wrote:

In Germany the second main national TV channel ZDF was pushing in the late 90s webpages with additional program related information via a gap in the teletext signal. it was called "intercast"

see: http://www.w3.org/Architecture/1998/06/Workshop/paper34/slides/sld004.htm

As did masses of US broadcasters - helped by the client being built in to Windows 98. It was Intels technology, not ZDFs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterCast

watty

Casablanca is not "open source". I did try to get a licence. But they could not decide on what basis as I was thinking of something other than Satellite.

Greece and Ireland need it the most.

talkingclock

MYOB wrote:

It was Intels technology, not ZDFs.

i didn't said that.

watty

He was just explaining for the OTHER readers... For every poster there are dozens of Lurkers.

I thought it was MS, didn't realise it was Intel.

It's on the UK editions of Windows 98 as an optional extra. I installed it once on a system that had a TV card and then realised later it was for a Push service that never existed here.