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What is Netcasting?
Netcasting, also known as Push Technology (a misnomer), and Webcasting is the automated delivery of personalized and up-to-date information.

Why introduce a new model of content delivery on the Internet? Because traditional Web-browsing poses many challenging problems for users:

  • It is difficult for users to find the information they are interested in. Access to an infinite number of Web sites makes it difficult to find relevant information.
  • Once users have found relevant information or sites, it is hard to automatically track and monitor when these sites change. Instead, users spend much time browsing a small set of sites to check for updated information.
  • Finally, the increased richness of Internet content has made browsing the Web over a low-speed connection a painfully slow experience.
To address these problems, Netcasting provides to each user automatic delivery and offline access to the information and Web sites that he or she uses most often. This new "push" model of content delivery has begun a wave of new technology that will revolutionize how users receive information on the Internet. Leading this wave, Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 provides superior technology that makes it easy to author "push" content, delivers solutions for home and corporate users, and introduces an open standard that is already bringing order and interoperability to a currently fragmented market.

Netcasting is designed to meet the needs of two different types of customers: dial-up/laptop users who are often offline (e.g., home and mobile users), and LAN-based corporate users who are usually online. Netcasting improves the dial-up experience through hands-free delivery of content for faster offline use, so information can be viewed without requiring the computer to be connected to the Internet and without the bandwidth limits of a modem. For LAN-based corporate users, Netcasting provides personalized updates to requested information by notifying each user when new content is available, without actually downloading the content.

What do I need?
Currently there are many new clients for Netcasting, but we have chosen the following because of their widespread popularity and ease of use:

Once you have installed the client of your choice, (or if you already have it installed), simply click on the appropriate link to the left, and subscribe this channel.

It's that easy!

What's the difference between Netcasting and standard Webpages?
You'll notice that many pages available through the Microsoft and Netscape Channel Guides rely heavily on "Dynamic HTML". You'll also notice that our channel does not. The reason for the paucity of "Dynamic HTML on our channel is simple: compatability. We endeavor to make this channel accessible to as many users as possible, and unfortunatley that means forgoing a lot of the "Bells and Whistles" available to a Browser/Platform specific channel. Then again, we like to think that our content is good enough to stand on it's own!

If you do not have a channel capable client, and you do not wish to install one, this site will still read as a standard Webpage.

What if I have problems?
You may access our help file for answers to commonly asked questions.

Other Netcasting Resources

Tutorials
You may subscribe by choosing a channel option to the left or you may read Adobe Product Update online. To find out more about Netcasting channles and what you need to subscribe, click here.

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