Push Technology

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1. Introduction

The user experience on the Internet today can be both overwhelming and tedious. With the staggering volumes of content on the Web, users often find it difficult to locate information of interest even when using sophisticated search engines. Compounding the problem is the relatively poor bandwidth and latency of the Internet. For most users, the Internet's manual search process is barely tolerable and certainly far from compelling. Driven by the need to simplify and tame these content delivery problems, "push" technologies have emerged.

One of newest phenomena to sweep the Internet, push technology provides a mechanism for content publishers to overcome the chaos, noise, and congestion on the World Wide Web. Also referred to as "netcasting," "webcasting," "channel broadcasting," "personal information delivery," and "information on demand," push technology reverses the Internet's content delivery model. Before push, content publishers had to rely upon the end users' own initiative to bring them to a website to view or download content. With push technology, the content publisher can deliver its content directly to the user's PC, substantially improving the likelihood that the user will view the content.

Push technology borrows some of the concepts used in traditional publishing, such as the subscription model, to streamline the delivery of content to the end user. Of course, using computer technology provides a more dynamic delivery mechanism than that afforded by the postal service or the neighborhood paperboy. Push content can be extremely timely, delivered fresh several times a day. In addition, push content can be customized to the specifications of each individual end user.

Why is Intel interested in push? Push, along with the Connected CD, Intercast^TM and Multiplayer Internet Gaming, is one of the Internet hybrid technologies that integrate the capabilities of the high performance PC with the Internet. Push technology facilitates the delivery of multimedia content on the Internet through the use of the local storage and transparent content downloads. In combination with content delivered on CD-ROM, push technology is an excellent mechanism to deliver content updates to the end user.

The purpose of this document is to help software and content developers to incorporate push technologies into their content delivery strategy. This document will answer the following questions

What is push technology?
How does push work?
What are the important features of push?
What are the future directions for the push category?

1.1 Intended Audience

Who can benefit from this document?

Website Developers--those already publishing content on the Internet today. These developers may be interested in using push applications to more effectively bring consumers to their content, or to deliver their content to the consumer.
Content Developers - those that publish content in any form, not necessarily on the Internet.
Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)--Software application developers that create content-oriented titles including consumer reference CD-ROMs and games. Push technology offers ISVs the capability to continuously update the customer with the latest version and fresh content.

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