Satellite Unclogs Net Connection on Campus

College students are prolific consumers of MP3 music files, but they are often pests to academic researchers and others who must compete with them for bandwidth on campus Internet connections. At Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., traffic from MP3 download services such as Napster accounted for 40% of the school’s Internet traffic.

So the university contacted Bucknell alum Jeff Boulter, now a senior director of product development at Launch Media, a Santa Monica firm that runs a music Web site.

The result was Launch College Direct, a service that uses IBeam Broadcasting’s proprietary system to stream Internet content via satellite and serve it up on a local network without clogging a university’s Net connection. Universities can get the system for free, and Launch will use it to deliver its own panoply of music and music videos. The service, announced last week, will be deployed first at Bucknell and at Georgia Tech.