An All-Day Seminar provided a thorough look at the current state of data broadcast architectures and the tools and standards that support them. If anyone ever does discover some killer applications for DTV's metadata and datacasting capabilities, it looks as though the infrastructure might actually be there to support them. That's certainly true for DTV standards.
Standards bodies can no longer operate in the vacuum of their own industry.
Now our increasing reliance on generic data manipulation, storage and transport considerably widens that circle of cooperation. If the European Commission's Schemas Forum brings consistency and order to the job of describing content on the worldwide web, we gain important tools to help describe, locate and manage our television assets. Datacasting received a lot of attention at the conference. Presentations by Geocast, iBlast, and Wavexpress all explained plausible, profitable business models for DTV datacasting. Tours to Model Station WHD showed working datacast hardware and software from Thomcast Communications, Trevini Digital, and Logic Innovations that produced on-air HDTV with a mix of dedicated and opportunistic datacasting using hardware and software.