At first, ImagicTV's proposal to broadcast television over your home phone line might sound like a bunch of white noise, especially given that wireless, cable, and satellite TV are working just fine. But the Saint John, New Brunswick, start-up is betting that The Simpsons bundled with high-speed Net access will convince consumers to permanently change channels.
By IP-multicasting over ADSL, ImagicTV can deliver programming over a carrier's multipoint network. Broadcasting several 3-Mbyte signals to each person in your neighborhood would rapidly bury the backbone, so the system combines requests for duplicate channels, pushing a single channel to your area router, where it's sent to individual homes.
Thus ImagicTV's technology will enable your phone company to deliver simultaneously TV shows, high-speed Internet access, and voice over your existing phone line for a monthly fee competitive with cable TV. Even better, you'll get a single bill for pay-by-channel fees, pay-per-view movies, Net access, and telephone service. An ImagicTV affiliate, New Brunswick Telephone, was the first to roll out the service this fall and plans to make it available to 70,000 users by year's end.
The sleepy Canadian province may seem an unlikely place to engineer a broadband breakthrough, but that doesn't bother the folks at ImagicTV. "It's cold up here," says ImagicTV president and CEO Marcel LeBrun. "People watch a lot of TV."
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