iBlast: Truck Routes In The Sky
It's an horrific scenario, presaged by the likes of Napster clogging up the precious broadband pipelines, an Internet that offers all the promise of L.A. at rush hour: gridlock on the Information Highway. Despite heroic efforts to shunt traffic to "the edge of the Internet" and through yet-to-be-built fiber networks, journalistic doomsayers are noting that the demand for pipeline is rapidly overtaking the supply.

So who's going to be taking up all that room, your private e-mail? Not. It's the trucks.

Yep, trucks. It's the cyber equivalent of eighteen-wheelers delivering endless orders of gobstopping content packages - streaming movies, records, DVDs, video games, monster software - that threaten to take up the lion's share of the Information Highway in the near future. And your modest little Volkswagen-sized e-mails are going to be stuck in traffic with them.

On real-life highways, the Department Of Motor Vehicles solved that problem a long time back. They invented the truck route. Take 'em off the Interstate and put 'em on their own set of back roads populated by gas stations and truck stops. It worked for the DMV.

It's about to work for the Information Highway.

The problem has been: where do you put the truck routes? A new consortium of TV stations has figured out just where to put them - in the sky.

About a year ago, I was suggesting to colleagues that the digital TV spectrum was the perfect place for sending excess Internet baggage -- there's plenty of room in that world already dedicated to humongously large-data signals. But I was told it was impossible. And you know what that means in Internet terms - somebody's probably already doing it.

That somebody turns out to be iBlast a bunch (a very large bunch) of TV stations and networks looking to mine the sprectrum Uncle Sam has given them for digital TV. They include: The Tribune, Gannett, Cox, The Washington Post, E.W. Scripps, Meredith Corporation, Media General, Lee Enterprises, The New York Times, McGraw Hill, Smith Broadcasting, and Northwest. They collectively own 143 stations in 102 markets, including all of the nation's top 25 media markets.