[SatNews] KVH Industries, Inc., (Nasdaq: KVHI) has debuted its new IP-MobileCast™ content delivery service for its market-leading mini-VSAT Broadband(sm) satellite network at the international Nor-Shipping show in Oslo, Norway. The IP-MobileCast service solves an important problem for maritime customers by providing an affordable way to receive large files through satellite links to their ships. These links are designed to allow electronic charts, detailed weather forecasts, e-learning materials, live news and sports clips, movies, IPTV, and IP-radio to be economically delivered to ships at sea. The new service is expected to be available later this year and will take advantage of additional capacity, delivering content “over the top” of the mini-VSAT Broadband network in a separate data stream without impacting customers’ contracted data speeds or airtime rate plans.
“Today, large files for things such as electronic chart database updates and movies are usually recorded on DVDs that are then physically shipped to the vessel and manually loaded onto onboard networks, a process that is slow, unreliable, and expensive,” said Brent Bruun, Executive Vice President of KVH’s Mobile Broadband Group. “Transmitting these large files over existing satellite services on a one-to-one basis is technically possible, but usually is either prohibitively expensive or even difficult due to service providers blocking certain file protocols to protect access to shared satellite network capacity. Our IP-MobileCast service will make delivering these large files fast, reliable, and affordable, enabling automatic over-the-air delivery of a new generation of content that is needed to enhance navigation, improve operations, and maintain crew morale.”
KVH’s IP-MobileCast service is designed to be an end-to-end solution that will use KVH’s CommBox™ Ship/Shore Network Manager to efficiently transmit content over the mini-VSAT Broadband network. KVH’s new TracPhone® V3-IP, V7-IP, and V11-IP all use the new Integrated CommBox Modem (ICM), which enables the systems to receive and decode multicast content. KVH also offers a stand-alone CommBox server for owners of legacy systems, making the IP-MobileCast service available to all mini-VSAT Broadband subscribers. User devices that may access the multicast data stored on the onboard server include ECDIS navigation systems, desktop, laptop, and tablet computers, smartphones, smart TVs, and any other IP-enabled device.
The IP-MobileCast service will use proprietary software designed to provide advanced error correction, compression, and validation of data integrity throughout the transmission from shore to ship for unparalleled reliability and efficiency. Shoreside servers encode files for transmission and queue them for multicast delivery “over the top” of the mini-VSAT Broadband network. The IP-MobileCast service’s patented Forward Error Correction (FEC) technology will help ensure that the CommBox servers on ships receive each file in perfect condition the first time it is transmitted. The unique FEC algorithms deliver the highest level of file reliability by accommodating intermittent non-continuous transmission, which might happen when large transmissions are interrupted by prioritized network traffic or in very poor weather conditions.
The file is transmitted once, and is received by every vessel in the satellite footprint. If the vessel has subscribed to that particular content, the data is stored and decoded using rights management software on the CommBox, and then made available on the onboard server. Normal mini-VSAT Broadband ship-to-shore and shore-to-ship transmissions are prioritized over the IP-MobileCast service and are completely unaffected in terms of speed or added airtime cost.
