by Theresa Foley

For satellite multimedia, content to be carried over new platforms has been slow to emerge–until now. Customers of SES Multimedia S.A. and The Fantastic Corp. are introducing new uses for multimedia satellite bandwidth. The number of initial end users is limited, but the potential exists to deliver the services to huge retail operations with thousands of outlets, which would mean big jumps in bandwidth usage over the next year.

E-max, a German multimedia company, is using Astra-Net to deliver music video clips to retail outlets in Germany, France and Italy. The music-video clips are used to create atmosphere in fast food stores like Burger King and clothing stores such as H&M. E-max negotiates rights to the clips, packages them into a 2.5-Gigabit file with the videos tied together with “interstituals,” which are special ads designed especially for the client profile of the store.

The Internet Protocol (IP)-based service became available to customers in early summer and by fall of 1999, satellite bandwidth usage was doubling every month, according to Robert Feierbach, Astra-Net’s interactive business director. E-max pays Astra by the bit, rather than buying part of a transponder, which keeps its transmission costs to a minimum.

“Currently E-max broadcast or multicast traffic has grown to about 15-20 gigabits per month for their customers, as their traffic has been roughly doubling every month since they began the commercial service three months ago. We expect this traffic to grow up to about 30-40 gigabits during the year 2000. We are also now discussing with E-max to book a dedicated IP stream (e.g. 2 Mbps) and to offer them package delivery within this stream on a permanent basis,” Feierbach says.

Deuromedia of Germany is another of Astra-net’s 30 customers and one that, like E-max, is “generating a nice income for us today,” says Feierbach. Live television is run on a PC using Deuromedia’s service, which combines IP services plus high speed DVB/MPEG. Customers are small broadcasters and content providers. “They create micro-channels for smaller broadcasters who don’t have a team of IP people,” Feierbach says.

For Astra, working the bugs out of the system for the first few multimedia applications took 12-18 months, much longer than anticipated, but Feierbach says the time to get an application to market now should be down to three to six months. To speed things up, Astra-Net has decided to use common tools and platforms for multimedia customers instead of custom-tailoring a service.

“The year 2000 is crucial,” he says. “We think we can bring major clients on board.” Astra-Net will push in 2000 to get its new convergence cards that bring TV and IP together for PCs accepted by computer manufacturers as standard equipment. Building a bigger base of content providers is another objective. Eventually a convergence card for TV set-top boxes will be introduced to take Astra-Net to a much larger audience, but that card won’t be ready until 2001.

The Fantastic Corp. also is developing new multimedia clients. Lars Tvede, Fantastic senior vice president for strategy, says the company’s Smartcaster Live product would be ready for customers by March. One of the product’s templates combines live video with a Power Point presentation (the popular Windows-based format for speeches and presentations). Customers can use Smartcaster Live to make a presentation of an executive or a trainer delivering a multimedia talk that can then be multicast via satellite to many sites at a reasonable cost. “You use broadband to speed up the way you run your business,” says Tvede. “We think it’s a killer application.”

Smartcaster Live is intended to be an interactive learning product with applications beyond the corporate world. It will go into testing with a limited group of users in March 2000 and will be ready for clients by June 2000.

Fantastic’s main focus in its first two years has been selling its network management centers to carriers such as NTT of Japan, BT, Loral Space and Communications, Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia. Tvede says the company now is building the service function over the centers, which involves taking media-rich broadband content and sending it on- demand at variable speeds, with the content providers paying for data processing provided by Fantastic. Tvede says that this type of service has not been available before. Fantastic has in 1999 filed for a patent with 24 claims to the technology involved. The broadcast industry, which has avoided Internet in the past because of its inability to handle its bandwidth-intensive content, now can be convinced to take its content on-line with these new services, Tvede says.

Without much larger numbers of users and a constant increase of bandwidth needs, the industry will have a hard time reaching the enormous projections for satellite broadband markets later in the decade. As 2000 unfolds, the projects debuting now over Astra-Net and Fantastic platforms will provide good indicators of how successful satellite multimedia companies can be in growing the business.

Theresa Foley is Via Satellite’s Senior Contributing Editor.