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Couldn’t get to downtown Salisbury for Wednesday’s Holiday Caravan parade?
No TV coverage? No problem.
You could have watched the parade — in real time — right at home on your computer.
Using a digital camera that plugged directly into its computers, Velocenet, a Salisbury-based Internet provider, “filmed” from the window of their third floor office in The Plaza right on the Square in Salisbury. They were able to give net surfers a constant streaming image of the parade.
Depending on an individual’s computer connection, the images would come in three frames every 10 seconds or faster.
But with the technology Velocenet has, the images could come in much faster and seem as if the footage was completely live.
“Anything you can do TV-transmission-wise, we can transmit over the Internet,”said Randy Willis, director of operations for Velocenet. “We can go out to football games, where there isn’t any coverage and broadcast over the Internet like TV does.”
The company uses broadband Internet technology — a form of wireless Internet — which allows users to have a much faster connection. To demonstrate the application of their technology, Randy Willis stood on Main Street to watch Wednesday’s parade as he watched on his computer to see, several seconds later, the parade go by.
Willis is able to intercept the Internet over the airwaves through a PCM/CIA-card. The card is loaded into a laptop’s expansion slot where a lap link goes.
“And there’s an inch-and-a-half antennae, and that picks up the signal,”Willis said.
The Web page that featured the parade only included video footage. And, without advertising other than a quick mention from WSTP radio (1490 AM), the page got a total of 72 “hits” or visits.
Members of the community were able to follow a link to the parade’s Web site from the company’s main page, www.velocenet.net.
The visits included 40 hits from Salisbury, 28 from Statesville and four from Charlotte.
“Next year, we will be partnering with WSTP (radio) so there will be an audio stream with video,” Willis said.
The parade was Velocenet’s second live event. They previously broadcast a press conference at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.
Velocenet can set up its equipment just as easily as a television or radio crew. Willis estimated his crew needed only about three minutes to set up to broadcast the Holiday Caravan.
Of course, it helps that the founders of Velocenet have been experimenting with computers since the 1970s and have actually watched this new technology develop right in front of them.
“Dan (Williford) and I started in college when they (computers) were still (using) punch cards, and we stayed with the technology ever since,”said John Muth, who founded Velocenet with Williford.
The two have stayed with the technology over the years, but for them, Velocenet is only a part- time job. Muth and Williford are pilots for USAirways, flying Boeing 767s.
But there’s nothing part-time about their company, which they incorporated in 1994. Velocenet now has 20 employees.
“The company started originally providing network services, but five years ago when the Internet became such a significant part of the technology level, some of our corporate customers started to have an interest in it and we opened it up to the general public,” Muth said.
The name of the company began as Computer Basics, but they changed it at the beginning of this year to Velocenet. Veloce means speed in Italian.
Speed comes in handy with another arm of Velocenet’s business — video game players.
The owners credit Muth’s son, John Edwards Muth III, with steering them toward that market. With the company’s latest creation, Velocegames, the organization has a Web site designed for video game players that will allow them to compete at faster levels.
“It minimizes latency,”said Jon Taylor, a network engineer at Velocenet, which means they can play faster. And that might give a “gamer” the edge he or she needs when competing online. Some of the games Velocegames currently handle on their Web page include Tribes II, Diablo II and Starcraft:Brood Wars.
Although Velocenet will offer the parade and football game broadcasts free as a community service, you have to pay $38.95 monthly for Velocenet’s other services, including the games.
The company also is exploring chat-based rooms on the Internet, according to Taylor. And if their record is any indication, people will be able to talk faster than ever before.
But how do they get their systems to operate so fast?
“That would be like Kentucky Fried Chicken giving away its secret sauce,”Muth said with a laugh. “Now that would be worth millions!”
Like any company operating on the cutting edge of technology, Muth wouldn’t give away too many details, but he did say that it was an implementation of current technology.
“We’re taking bandwidth that was formerly reserved for large corporations because of the cost and passing them along to the customer for a fraction of the cost,”Muth said.
Besides Rowan County, Velocenet is focused on Statesville, Kannapolis, Concord and North Charlotte, but plans to offer their Internet services to the Triad area by the end of the year.
“We proved that you don’t have to be AOL in order to bring high tech or cutting edge technology to the public at a reasonable price,” Willis said.
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