ESA backs business project to deliver music by satellite
The European space agency (ESA) has helped an innovative business project to deliver CD-quality music to customers via satellite. The scheme, which used high-speed satellite communications to bypass terrestrial Internet bottlenecks, has potentially revolutionary implications for e-commerce. UK-based company Avanti Communications suggested the idea of using the geostationary ASTRA satellite, which provides television services to millions of Europeans, to provide a service offering fast delivery of CD-quality music on demand. The customer selects tracks from a web site and receives the music via satellite to their PC-linked stereo or burned direct onto compact disc. The ABARIS (advanced broadcast architecture for retail internet services) project aimed to test the feasibility of using satellites to offer a digital delivery system. The scheme is one of a range of innovative business plans using space technology which the ESA hopes to back. David Bestwick, managing director of Avanti, described the trial as very successful. 'It's one thing to develop an idea on paper but you have to test how it will work in reality,' he said. 'Any technology is only as good as it is received by its users. We got very positive feedback from the trial users and at the end we knew our idea was right.' Anyone can currently download music through the Internet, but the process can be time consuming and requires compression software. The satellite system used by Avanti is 20 times faster than the speediest ISDN phone connection. Although the trial scheme concentrated on music, ABARIS could also be used to deliver software, books, movies or other digital products. The multimedia division of ESA's ARTES (advanced research in telecommunication systems) programme assisted the trial. Francesco Feliciani from the ARTES multimedia application line said: 'Our experience from the ARTES programme is that many European businesses, often new to the space field, are a rich source of ideas for new telecommunication applications. In particular, smaller companies often possess vision which could lead to innovative systems but their ideas don't take off because of limited resources.' He explained that the ARTES programme hopes to encourage European and Canadian companies to use satellite telecommunication in an innovative way. ARTES has already played a role in more than 40 projects in the field of multimedia applications with companies from Europe and Canada.