Users of Sat@Once can listen to audio files of the most popular podcasts. Podcasts are selected by Sat@Once's unique voting system.
"These two complimentary technologies are greatly suited to the goals of the Sat@Once project", explains Vu Tien Khang of SES Astra and Project Manager for Sat@Once. "Sat@Once aims to transform the Internet into a new medium rivalling that of radio and TV. We started our free service at the beginning of April 2002 and currently have over 150,000 subscribers."
RSS allows sharing of the latest entries of web sites, giving visitors the latest news. The popularity of ADSL has created high use of RSS. It is widely used by the weblog community to publicise new pages and attach multimedia files. The technology is also being extensively used by major news organisations such as Reuters, CNN, the BBC and many more to come.
'Podcasting' is a way of publishing audio broadcasts via the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed of new files, often MP3. What makes Podcasting distinct from other types of online media is the use of a RSS feed to deliver an enclosed file. Digital audio or video files can be broadcast to the computer.
Podcasting and RSS are only some of the recent improvements made to the Sat@Once platform. Others include improved profiling so that users receive more targeted content to their PC's.
Sat@Once
Sat@Once is European in scale and uses the Casablanca service which selects from the Internet content which is of interest to a maximum number of users. The content is then broadcast via satellite free of charge. The project is fully supported by ESA Telecom and SES-ASTRA of Luxembourg to promote the use of satellite in daily life.
In the early stages of the Sat@Once project CSP of Italy acted as founding partner and now works as a sponsoring partner together with SES-Astra in the follow on project Sat-n-Surf. Sat-n-Surf is dedicated to make improvements in the Sat@Once platform.(see related links).
Sat@Once delivers a free service that is available only in Europe, in geographical locations that are under the footprint of the satellite ASTRA-1G.
Footprint of the ASTRA-1G satellite
Learning German via satellite
The German based international broadcaster Deutsche Welle has also put Sat@Once to good use. As of 25 August 2005, it has made German language courses available to all Sat@Once users.
Aimed at both beginners and advanced speakers, the lesson material consists of audio files and booklets and is downloadable. One chapter will be made available each week for the 26 week duration of the course. Only small changes needed to be made to the content before being suitable for delivery via Sat@Once.
| Headquartered in Bonn Germany, Deutsche Welle is an international broadcasting service offering a global package of programmes for radio, television and the Internet. TV is broadcasted in German, English and Spanish, and radio is broadcasted in German and 29 foreign languages. The multimedia Internet service communicates in 31 languages. |
Communications Engineer Heico Salfeld for ESA Telecom and Technical Officer for the Sat@Once project states:
"The Sat@Once service currently delivers the most popular web content for free. The addition of RSS and podcasting as well as tailored user profiles will help convince even more people to enjoy the many advantages of receiving web content via satellite."
To read more about Sat@Once or Sat-n-Surf, a recently started project to further improve the platform, just click under related links at the top-right of this page.
Deutsche Welle HQ image courtesy of Deutsche Welle
Other images courtesy of Sat@Once
