National Datacast

» see nationaldatacast.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Above the visible picture on an analog television there were lines that never got displayed. The electron beam needed time to climb back to the first line, and that interval, the vertical blanking interval, was dead air inside a live broadcast. PBS had already learned to put something in it: closed captions, encoded on NTSC line 21, the last line before the picture starts.

National Datacast, Inc. was incorporated in May 1988 to sell the rest of that space. It was a for-profit subsidiary of PBS Enterprises, built directly on the captioning work, and its business was leasing bandwidth nobody could see across the entire PBS station network at once. Public television stations covered the country and their signals were already on the air. The blanking interval was being thrown away.

The customers were the ones who needed to reach a great many devices and did not care about speed. MovieBeam, Disney's set-top box that filled itself overnight with films you had not asked for, moved its data this way, using dNTSC licensed from Dotcast and distributed to stations by National Datacast. UpdateTV pushed firmware into television sets that had no other way of receiving it. When broadcasting went digital the company moved to ATSC and kept selling the same thing.

The nearest version of this I actually touched was TRT teletext, reached by pressing a button on the remote until a page of blocky text replaced the news, riding the same unseen part of the signal on the European standard rather than the American one. That was the trick's consumer face. National Datacast sold the industrial face of it, to companies rather than viewers, which is how it managed to be invisible twice over.

~ the record ~

~ line 21 ~

Line 21 is visible if your television does not crop the overscan. On a modern set playing old footage you sometimes get a row of flickering black and white dashes along the top of the frame, and that is caption data, still encoded, with nothing left to decode it. National Datacast may also have used other lines in the blanking interval for other kinds of data, which the NAB Engineering Handbook records without specifying.

This was never a fast pipe. The point was that it was a nearly free one, already paid for by a broadcast happening anyway, reaching every receiver in range with no return path and no cost per device. Datacasting was a good answer to a question the internet went on to answer better, which is the shortest possible history of the business.

~ the budget line ~

Current reported in June 2013 that National Datacast was closing a substantial portion of its business operations before June was out. The source was not a company announcement. It was PBS's own fiscal 2014 budget, and the numbers in it were $2.4 million of expected expenses against $100,000 of expected revenue for fiscal 2013. CFO Denise Wise would not say how many public television clients the company had or how many people worked there, and offered only that it was exploring opportunities to achieve the most value from assets held by the company. The chief executive and co-founder, Jacqueline Weiss, declined to be interviewed, and the board chair declined to comment.

~ march 9 ~

The legal end sits in PBS's consolidated financial statements for the year ended 30 June 2015, precise in the way only an auditor's note can be. During fiscal 2015 National Datacast bought out its minority shareholders, 11.42 percent held between one customer and three PBS member stations. Current had named them two years earlier as Rovi, WNET, KPBS and Rocky Mountain PBS, and 88.58 plus 11.42 closes the company exactly. Effective 9 March 2015 it ceased operations and every asset and liability transferred to PBS Enterprises. On the same date PBS Enterprises stopped being a corporation and became PBS Enterprises, LLC.

The station agreements did not die with it. PBS Enterprises still holds the network and license agreements that National Datacast originally signed, and UpdateTV is still running under a company called Qterics, still leasing broadcast bandwidth to push firmware into television sets that would otherwise never be updated.

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