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as two terabytes per month. Beyond this, Divide & Conquer bring a new twist to a market which is left for ship’s business and everything he says, “That’s the difference between Both KVH and Maritime Broadband rapidly evolving from one which origi- else. our service and others – we’re sending have set out to provide MLC pleasing nally provided simple voice communica- Solving the on board broadband band- a lot of live content continuously. So, in content for crews, in an ef? cient and tions for ship’s business, into one which width problem therefore has become the times when you are not in peak demand economical fashion, but without imping- can facilitate training, address crew mor- challenge for users and providers alike. for your bandwidth, you have a lot of ing on the core business of the ship. Both al issues and have plenty of bandwidth And, the race is on.

capacity available on your satellite net- work. We send data all the time when our network is under-utilized and we priori- tize it so we’re not competing with the connectivity, but we have a huge amount of capacity that we’re able to deliver content on. The MLC – making the crew happy part – it doesn’t interfere with ship’s business.”

It’s not all fun and games at KVH, however. Agreements with Transas and Jeppesen for the delivery of elec- tronic charts and AWT for weather and advanced voyage planning round out the high speed, data rich KVH menu. “We’re trying to meet the operations and crew morale needs of the vessel. We have some clever technology that allows us to ef? ciently deliver large amounts of content.”

Not surprisingly, KVH will retain the Videotel brand. With a user base of about 11,000 customers, Dodez thinks that KVH will take them to the next step, delivering their content ef? ciently via multicasting.

Cost: The Bottom Line

The Multicasting entertainment ser- vice is sold in three packages, starting at $300 per month. Dodez insists, “The beauty of it is that you take a tremendous strain off your communication solution.

And when the crew is using this content, they’re not going out on the internet and trying to get it somewhere else.

Operators can look at how much is actually being used and cut back if they need to. And, they can customize their services to the point where they actually might be paying less than they were in the ? rst places without the entertainment content.”

At KVH, There are two ways to go: those operators already having connec- tivity for operations might go with the

KVH multicasting solution for the crew to separate and relieve pressure off the operational networks. But, as operators begin to cut back on crew access because of the impact that it has of ship’s busi- ness, a standalone KVH entertainment solution may just be the ticket. On the other hand, signing up for the total solu- tion will do the exact same thing. That’s because, says Dodez, “We never tax the system with the content. So far, most of our entertainment customers are existing customers who use our standard offer- ings. We’re doing very well in the off- shore markets.” www.marinelink.com 45

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