Like some giant amoeba, the Net absorbed yet another closed system into into its body Wednesday. In a follow-up to Microsoft's announcement Tuesday night that it was supporting a new standard for push channel formats, PointCast announced that it will open up its Internet broadcast system and allow anyone who runs a Web site to build their own channel on the PointCast Network.
"The profound step we took as a company last night is that we have intellectual property rights all over this space," PointCast CEO Chris Hassett said at a Wednesday morning news conference at the Internet World trade show in Los Angeles, "so we announced that we were going to make available to publishers a royalty-free opportunity to use our property rights."
Hassett said PointCast "co-defined" the new push standard - called the Channel Description Format - with Microsoft and will jointly submit it to Net standards governing bodies.
With the introduction of the CDF and its new "Connections" service, PointCast expects that its users will have access to virtually unlimited channels of content from small publishers - just as viewers now receive content from PointCast Network partners, Wired among them.
"Absolutely anyone can publish on PointCast - there are probably going to be so many options, you'll need a search engine to figure it out. But if a corporation doesn't want any of this public access stuff, they can just turn it off at their firewall," said Jim Wickett, a senior VP.
Unlike current content providers on the PointCast Network, PointCast Connections publishers will set up their Web sites in the CDF format, on their own servers. PointCast Network partners will continue to have their content broadcast via PointCast's own specialized servers and be able to generate advertising revenue specific to the venue, Wickett said.
PointCast currently sells ads on the channels built by its media partners, including CNN and The New York Times. But it won't sell ads on the Connections channels, where everyone from the local softball team to Inc. magazine will create content. Asked how he planned to make money off such sites, Hassett called it a "derivative derivative revenue opportunity, rather than a direct opportunity."
PointCast already claims to have attracted more than a million regular users to its service. So why does it need to open it up?
"The answer is that by doing this," Hassett said, "we have a whole other area of our business coming through the data centers; we have all of our media partners building programming there. The effect is, we get greater circulation. We also have a more engaging product for the user. The product is more custom to the person using it."
