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Technology Stocks : WAVX Anyone? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Marty Lee who wrote (10739)	9/17/2000 9:02:59 PM
From: UncleverName	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11417

Marty, Re: WaveXpress demo, from Dave Nadig at Metamarkets community.metamarkets.com (The link has been changing here, so best of luck.) But why do you need the satellite at all if I've got fiber in my house? The answer is interactive TV (this is my answer, they didn't even bring it up). Last night I hooked up with Steven Sprague, CEO of Wave Systems, and went through their latest demo for Wave Express (they have a suite here where they are giving demos to all comers). Wave Express is essentially a toolkit that lets content providers and systems manufacturers layer secure data and transactions over any kind of content. The beauty of the system is its simplicity. You're viewing device, whether it's the TV itself, your computer, or a set-top box, just uses a standard browser as the viewing window for TV/broadband content. The content generator (say the TV production company) codes the TV signal using a variety of nonproprietary technologies that embed data in the analog stream of TV (near invisible clues on the screen, ultrasonic tones) to pass data to the browser. These technologies have been around for a while, so there's nothing new there. The browser then uses whatever net connectivity is available to deliver the "interactive" content. This can be transaction enabled advertising, pay per view menus, related links, support content, whatever you want to code up on a web page. Wave's hook in here is that by encrypting everything using their Embassy system, all the interactive content can be both secure and transactionable: you can have the soundtrack to the movie you're watching resident on the hard drive, waiting for the user to buy each track if they choose to. The applications in which this encryption/transaction browser overlay strategy can work are pretty broad: any kind of digital content can go along for the ride. Imagine watching CNBC in a window on your PC, where every time a stock is mentioned you get a net-driven intraday chart (and perhaps a link to your broker already coded for the stock). And it works. It's not a prototype. The chips are out there (at least in Hauppauge boards, and soon in the Compaq keyboard) and ready to drop into anyone's set top box, net device, or computer. The API's are written and work. I think this is why Microsoft finally got on the Wave bandwagon. The Wave toolkit is so simple that it seems like an obvious addition to any interactive TV OS, and MSFT seems to be getting serious about that. An interesting side note: set top boxes or TV tuner cards are actually not required for any of this to work. Theoretically, all that's required is a way to get the signal out of the TV into your PC, and this can be as simple as sticking your PC microphone in front of the TV. That's all it takes to have IE pop up that intraday chart, or the map of Kenya, or the links to buy the soundtrack. Whether it's satellite or cable, I can see the roll for broadcast banded with broadband here. Interesting stuff. --- Dave Nadig MetaMarkets.com