Broadband Deal Supplants Broadcast With 'Cleancast,' Begins Altering The Nature Of Television

Television gave us broadcast. Cable TV gave us narrowcasts. The Internet gave us the cybercast. Now, the fusion of TV and broadband is casting a new TV convention on the ad industry: the cleancast. The concept, which is just now being deployed as part of the coverage surrounding the NCAA college basketball tournament, utilizes a new technology that strips out the original broadcast TV ads scheduled as part of CBS' broadcast TV coverage of the games and replaces them with broadband video versions sold by its online counterpart CBS Sportsline. The innovation is just one of a series of new developments broadband video operators are encountering and putting their mark on as they begin adapting TV to the Internet.

"We've essentially had to make it up as we go along," says Jon Klein, president-CEO of The FeedRoom.com, a company that serves as a middleman between broadband content providers and subscribers, and the one that is providing the broadband video feeds for CBS Sportsline's coverage of the NCAA games. The broadband video package, which is available at no cost to subscribers of AOL's broadband service, can be purchased for $9.95 from CBS Sportsline via FeedRoom.

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As part of its coverage, CBS Sportsline sold a package of special broadband video advertising to advertisers such as McDonald's, Pontiac and the U.S. Army that are separate from and covers over the original TV ads that are being fed through the network's broadcast TV coverage. To make this work, FeedRoom developed the Cleancast, a technology that "cleans out" the broadcast spots and replaces them with broadband video spots, says Klein, adding that the concept has been trademarked and has a patent pending by FeedRoom.

Due to the unique complexity of the NCAA tournament coverage, which airs four college playoff games simultaneously, the system required that FeedRoom create four banks of broadband video processing equipment - one for each game - that were each equipped with a tape delay mechanism that gives FeedRoom a few seconds to digitally cover over the broadcast spots and cue up the broadband video ads, which go out as a live signal to broadband video subscribers who are unaware of the switch.

"Behind the scenes, it has been a frenzy, but to the subscribers, it's a seamless experience," says Klein, noting that the unique nature of the NCAA coverage has required yet another innovation in broadband video to deal with the digital rights management issues associated with a live sports event that distributes four games simultaneously.

That innovation, which FeedRoom has trademarked as the Zapcode, enables broadband video to do what the TV industry establishment - neither broadcast, nor cable nor satellite TV - have managed to accomplish in more than half a century of televising live sports events: accommodating home town team blackout requirements. Unlike TV, which requires telecasters to literally black out coverage of local games to viewers in their home town markets, FeedRoom has developed a zip-code based digital coding technology - aptly named Zapcode - that automatically recognizes the location of broadband video subscribers and gives them the option of viewing any of the three other NCAA games that are emanating from outside their local market.

"There are huge implications of this technology" that go beyond simply digital rights management, says Klein, who noted, for example, that it could also be used to customize feeds to broadband video subscribers based on their geographic preferences.

Klein says FeedRoom is still learning from the NCAA experience, which is at about the midpoint of the tournament.

"Mind you, we've had ten days to throw this together," he sighs, adding, "I guess that's why they call it March Madness."

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