Microsoft will discontinue its MSN Direct datacasting service at the end of 2011. MSN Direct provides location-based services — traffic reports, weather, gas prices, stock quotes — to navigation systems via FM subcarrier signals.
It provides a variety of messaging services to Smart Watches and was part of the company’s SPOT, or Smart Personal Objects Technology, initiative. It has infrastructure in 134 cities, reports Radio World.
Bill Gates showed off the first consumer SPOT watches at the January, 2004 CES in Las Vegas. At the same time, Gates announced the launch of Microsoft’s MSN Direct broadcasting service to transmit content to the watches.
After Jan. 1, 2012, devices, such as Weather Stations and Smart Watches, will no longer receive the MSN Direct information and offer limited alternative functionality.
“Leveraging unused FM radio spectrum to broadcast data represented a step forward in 2004, however, many choices today including Wi-Fi, cellular, FM Radio Data System (RDS) and other digital networks are now readily available and are continuing to grow in popularity.“As such,” it continued, “Microsoft has made the decision to focus future U.S. and Canada investments on these existing network connections and discontinue the MSN Direct services business. Microsoft will continue to explore new ways to leverage the efficiencies of FM digital broadcast in other applications and markets going forward.”
The company said it will continue to sell 12-month subscriptions until the end of 2010.
Microsoft’s DirectBand uses the 67.65 kHz subcarrier leased by Microsoft from commercial radio broadcasters. This subcarrier delivers about 12 kbit/s per radio tower, for over 100 MB per day per city. Data includes traffic, sports, weather, stocks, news, movie times, calendar appointments, and local time.
DirectBand does not use the RBDS (Radio Broadcast Data System) subcarrier. RDS/RBDS is a different and lower bandwidth (~730bit/s) subcarrier, primarily used for radio station information, music identification, and traffic. DirectBand and RDS can co-exist on the same FM station. Some Garmin GPS units, such as the nüvi 680, allow traffic notifications, weather forecasts, movie schedules and local gas prices to be received through MSN Direct.
