Intercast

Intercast was a short-lived technology developed in 1996 by Intel for broadcasting information such as web pages and computer software, along with a single television channel. It required a compatible TV tuner card installed in a personal computer and a decoding program called Intel Intercast Viewer. The data for Intercast was embedded in the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) of the video stream carrying the Intercast-enabled program.

With Intercast, a computer user could watch the TV broadcast in one window of the Intercast Viewer, while being able to view HTML web pages in another window. Users were also able to download software transmitted via Intercast as well. Most often the web pages received were relevant to the television program being broadcast, such as extra information relating to a television program, or extra news headlines and weather forecasts during a newscast. Intercast can be seen as a more modern version of teletext.

The Intercast Viewer software was bundled with several TV tuner cards at the time, such as the Hauppauge Win-TV card. Also at the time of Intercast's introduction, Compaq offered some models of computers with built-in TV tuners installed with the Intercast Viewer software.

Upon its debut, Intercast was used by several TV networks, such as NBC, CNN, The Weather Channel, and M2 (now MTV2).

Intel discontinued support for Intercast a couple of years later.

NBC's series Homicide: Life on the Street was a show that was Intercast-enabled.

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Intercast Networks

Intercast Networks, founded in 2006 with offices in Israel and the United States, is an early-stage, privately-held, Venture Capital backed technology company. Intercast is developing a group of next-generation content delivery products based on its Multicast-to-Storage™ technology to enable Network Providers to provide their users with massive amounts of personalized, on-demand and high-quality digital media.
Intercast Networks’ solution enables network operators to leverage their current infrastructure roll out to deliver an order of magnitude more personalized content at a fraction of the cost without additional network investments. M2S can be utilized to introduce a variety of profitable Internet based services including a personalized, high definition and on-demand TV experience with broadcast-like network scalability and economic efficiencies.