Technology from digital audio and video specialist, Duck Corp, is being used as part of a $60m trial of on video on demand services in Alberta, Canada. Duck’s TrueCast video streaming software and TrueMotion RT software compression technologies are being used in video-on-demand web site trials being offered to 3,400 homes in Edmonton and Calgary. Run by Telus Multimedia, a project of Telus Corp, the trial is testing residential customers’ response to interactive multimedia services. Users will get high-speed digital internet access and local web site access. TV based services will be phased in, including cable TV, movies on demand, pay per view events, the ability to surf the web on the TV, and an interactive program guide to provide access to Canadian content. The trial will roll out in two phases: the current phase is the technical trial during which the services are free. The marketing trial will begin later this year to determine pricing. The high-speed internet component of the trial is being delivered through a 52 Mbps broadband fiber-to-the-curb ATM architecture installed in the three test neighborhoods. The system set up is such that there is a Java client for residential customers to access content, movies and news, and a Java client for loading the content onto the servers. The customer client is a combination of Netscape, Java applets, Shockwave, JavaScript, in-house developed plug-ins, an audio streaming plug-in and a video-streaming plug-in supplied by Duck. The content-loading clients are Java applets and a custom-developed plug-in. Last year Microsoft Corp licensed video technology from privately held, New York-based Duck to be used in its DirectX media applications programming interface (CI No 3,153).
