The Mp3Car Blog

We go for a drive as the Cruisecast team shows us the guts of their prototype device and an example of their buffering technology.   Talk about this on our forums:

The CEO of Raysat/Cruisecast  (AT&T partnership) gave us a 20 minute technical explanation on the satellite, antennas, transponders, compression and how they have made CruiseCast  “cruise” .  A product overview can be found with the interview of Cruiscast’s President .   There are more technical details in our CruiseCast drive test video.

Talk about this on our forums here.

AT&T & RaySat kick off satellite service “CruisecCast” for the car.  Mp3car interviews RaySat’s President, Winston Guillory in HD.

In a three-part HD video interview, mp3Car interviews AT&T’s and Raysat’s “CruiseCast” executive team today.

We are going to kick this off this three-part interview with President, Winston Guillory.  Later this week we will post the rest of the interviews with their Chairman & CEO as well as a drive test through the Vegas streets.   The CruiseCast team was also kind enough to show us all the innards of their prototype hardware, which we will share with you later in the week as part 3.

Talk about this on our forums here.

AT&T has partnered up with RaySat to deliver 22 high quality video and 20 audio channels to the back seat of cars.  They have launched a working preview of their services at SEMA 2008 with a consumer delivery promise set for sprint of 2009.   Anticipated monthly services fees are 28$

This is not the holy grail of a connected car, but AT&T has done a lot of hard work here that no other company has released yet.  

• They have a relativity small Antenna

• They have about a minute of data caching 'baked in' to allow for driving through parking garages short tunnels and other structures.
• Some juicy content deals appear to be done (full list below
• They have a commited shipping date
  

The reason why this isn’t so cool is there is no national or even local bidirectional link, which would allow for all of the services we have been dreaming of:

• Mobile concierge.
• Paid content, pay per view content.
• Mobile Instant content gratification - I like this song or video, buy me now.

You can imagine that with AT&T’s network, these features will be on the roadmap.

Tomorrow we are taking a driving demo and will report on how you can install this in your car when it comes out.   From the quick stuff I have read, this after market add on receiver product appears to be  pretty easy to install in almost any car (or car comptuer system). 

Talk about this in our forums under the AT&T Cruisecast discussion.

Content deals in place:
“Disney Channel, Toon Disney, Discovery Kids, Animal Planet, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network Mobile, USA, COMEDY CENTRAL, MSNBC, CNN Mobile Live and CNBC. Twenty satellite radio music channels will also be available at the launch.”