Subsequent connections take less time, averaging between two and five minutes, depending on the speed of your connection. Some companies with a lot of employees hooked to the Internet have expressed concern about the ability of the PointCast client to be a serious bandwidth hog. If a couple hundred clients try to pull down news updates all at once, even the most robust corporate network can be brought to its knees. However, PointCast has software businesses that can cache news updates. One machine running this program gets the updates, and then PointCast clients can get their information from that computer.
News is displayed in a series of windows when the program is running.
Clicking on various tabs brings up different types of information, from stock charts to weather maps to news briefs. In screen-saver mode, you see only headlines and a stock ticker moving continuously across the bottom of the screen. Both modes feature advertising in a separate window. It can get quite irritating, but at least there's no sound. The PointCast Network has been in its testing phase, and the finished version of its software is due this week.