Len, I'm no electrical engineer but "VBI" appears to be the non-televised portion of the vertical side band transmission.
Roughly, VSB delivers about 20 Mbps of data and HDTV requires about 12 Mbps and SDTV (at 450 interlaced scanned lines) requires about 3 Mbps. Thus, each local broadcaster will have many options in the use of its digital bandwidth and Microsoft wants to be a big part of these options. Broadcasters may use all the bandwidth for TV (up to six channels of SDTV) or use the non-TV bandwidth for various options including webcasting, gaming, and others as listed in the article.
With VSB, MMDS, LMDS, cable modems, ADSL, DBS, etc.., bandwidth is going to be both plentiful and, eventually, very cheap to the American consumer. Appears that VSB and LMDS (tower to antenna transmissions with up to 40 Mbps pipe) offer the highest perfomance/cost ratios and VSB will be the first to market. If so, Zenith (with its VSB patents) wins big.....
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