Media-rich Multi-party conferencing over the Alphasat and Inmarsat-4 satellites

NetCaster will provide a solution for customers looking for multi-party conferencing over the Alphasat and Inmarsat-4 satellites with low capital investment and control over operational cost. NetCaster will provide reliable asymmetric multiparty conferencing with low latency. The baseline mode of operation is highly robust audio, this is complemented by ‘rich media’ in a manner dependent upon available hardware resources and network capacity. The objective is to provide a solution for event managers and producers who have a requirement to gather media from contributors using smartphone and tablet technology in combination with land mobile, vehicular mount and maritime Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) terminals. To enable a variety of media to be transmitted to a receiver making best use of available bandwidth with graceful fallback to robust audio. An underlying design goal of NetCaster is to be able to exploit the different service types available on the BGAN network and deliver rich interactive media over background class data connections.