The WorldSpace Corporation has launched its digital audio broadcast service, which will eventually have a potential audience of 4.6 billion people, or 75% of the world population, in 122 countries. When its satellite network is complete, WorldSpace will offer broadcasters 120 million square kilometres of coverage, most of it in third world territories.
The service is the first of its kind.
The AfriStar satellite now in operation is the first of three, with AsiaStar covering Central and East Asia scheduled for launch in February 2000, and AmeriStar covering South and Central America to follow soon after.
"Today the WorldSpace project ends and the WorldSpace business begins," says CEO Noah Samara, who founded the company in 1990, only to have investors laugh at his ambitious project. He expects to break even on the more than $1 billion total investment in five years or less.
Samara wants to change the world with WorldSpace. "People are as developed as the information they can access," he says. "We are committed to creating information affluence." That is why the corporation has launched in Africa and will continue to focus on the third world. The strategy is not entirely missionary, as Samara says these regions are under-serviced. "Ultimately we will make tons of money by addressing real market needs," he says.
AfriStar now broadcasts more than 20 audio channels from an orbit of 35km in three separate beams, which combine to cover the entire continent. Special receivers use the patented STARMAN chipset to decode the signal, which can range in quality from 16 to 128 kilobits per second. Stations broadcast to the station at 7025 to 7075MHz, and the satellite broadcasts its output in the 1452 to 1492MHz region. The MPEG 2.5 Layer 3 compression protocol is used.
Current broadcasters include a range of music channels, regional stations such as Kosmos Digitaal and Kaya-FM from SA, and business and news channels like CNN International and Bloomberg. The WorldSpace revenue model depends on broadcasters, as the signal is distributed for free. It will also produce some of its own content to add an advertising revenue stream.
The company expects to add one-way data traffic in the foreseeable future. "We will broadcast gigabytes of data in both images and text soon," Samara promises. Selected Web sites will be broadcast in full and transferred to hard drive according to user preference. All current receivers are capable of data output. Samara believes the need for such broadcasts is great, even in Africa. "The ability of people on the continent to buy Pentium III systems is not matched by the ability of governments everywhere to provide [data] infrastructure."
Receivers are manufactured by Panasonic, Sanyo, Hitachi and JVC, and are available at several outlets in SA. The units currently retail at between R2 000 and R3 000, but manufacturers ITWeb spoke to are confident the price will soon drop considerably. "It depends on adoption," one said. "It could become as widely used as FM. What does a cheap FM receiver cost? About $1?" Some 30 000 receivers are being distributed to kick the project off, and another 100 000 are expected to be delivered to the continent by year-end.
WorldSpace holds a 10% stake in Freeplay Energy, the company developing wind-up radio technology.
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