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From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: satellite netnews costs
Message-ID: <466@vortex.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 11-Dec-84 18:16:52 EST
Article-I.D.: vortex.466
Posted: Tue Dec 11 18:16:52 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Dec-84 05:02:19 EST
Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles
Lines: 69

For God's sake.  Some people just LOVE to knock things, don't they?

First of all David, I haven't made a dime on this project.  Nor is
it terribly likely that I ever will.  If someday I manage to 
get some reimbursement for my time or some additional consulting
that'll be great, but I have no way to expect that.

I've been donating all my time and efforts to this project, as
have various other people, not to mention Usenix which has been
paying expenses and the WTBS satellite carrier who is giving us free
satellite time for the experiment.

As for costs, we're not talking about hacked-together toys here.
We're talking about commercial equipment made by large
firms who aren't in business for their health.  The equipment that
people buy now for this kind of vertical interval decoding costs close to
$1000 OR MORE, for video input.  These things simply aren't in
the kind of mass production that could bring things down to 
consumer levels, and there is a lot of complexity that goes far
beyond the more ordinary "teletext magazine" decoders.  The fact
that the end-user cost, including markups along the way, may get
as low as $500, including demod, has amazed the industry people who have
been working in this field all along.  The companies making the equipment
(NOT ME -- I'm not selling these things) either make money on the
products or they will not build them.  Custom chips are involved to 
handle the decoding and decryption, by the way.
 
Once again, we are NOT talking toys here, we are talking national
broadcasting over the largest non-sports basic cable service in
the world -- WTBS.

The actual breakdown for the (hoped-for) $500 cost is about $130
for a very nice RF/video demod (direct tuning for cable channels with
all the special filtering and tuning circuits required for the very
delicate teletext tuning) and about $370 for the actual decoder
with RS232 output.  That's about 1/2 the price of anything
available today, and even this price is at risk unless there is
sufficient demand to drive the manufacturing.  Only recently
has enough demand seemed to appear.  

The additional buffering hardware would basically include CPU, lots 
of memory, interfaces, power supply, and similar items.  Individually,
such items aren't that expensive.  But by the time you get someone
to make the PC boards and assemble the units into cases and stock them,
you're talking a couple of hundred bucks (I'm hoping for $150-$200, but
there's no way to know for sure at this point since we don't
know who would do the manufacturing and on what terms) even if you're 
not interested in making any profit on them.  

While it's nice to be able to play around sometimes, and while
some people are willing to donate their time to such projects,
we can't force EVERYONE to be so altruistic and do everything
for free.  The people working with the project right now have
no way of knowing that we'll ever see a cent in terms of time
reimbursement, but we're happy to do the work anyway because
it's a good cause.  I'm hoping that the effective costs of decoders
and demods can be reduced to the end user even further through
rental/buyback rather than purchases if that can be made possible.

HOWEVER, if the network community doesn't like the way the
project is going, I will give the satellite people
a call, tell them to pull the plug on stargate, and then
I'll even have more time to work on projects that can help
me pay this month's rent.

What say you, oh entities of the net?  Please post to this group.
Thanks much.

--Lauren--