Toronto startup to tap MPEG-4 market in Europe with specialty programming

Toronto startup TVHello hopes to exploit emerging MPEG-4 television encoding technology to begin broadcasting a new digital specialty channel aimed at Europeans sometime this summer. The technology, which TVHello partner Rui Pereira says delivers the promise of true web television, flies beneath the regulatory radar of the CRTC, leaving the small company the flexibility to use inexpensive content to attract advertising dollars. Canadian NEW MEDIA reported on February 7 that the company had filed for trademark protection for its logo and was able finally to track down Pereira to explore the project (CNM, Feb. 7/03). Pereira, one of three partners in the venture, explains that the company plans an information channel incorporating video, text and graphics similar to Toronto’s CP24, a local all-news specialty channel owned by CHUM Television. TVHello will offer general news and entertainment content such as sports and horoscopes but will also focus on providing a European audience with information about travel opportunities in Canada. Pereira says the company has already amassed a collection of related public-domain material and is in the midst of obtaining more as well as negotiating with sponsors. The channel will be broadcast via EutelSat’s Open Skies platform, a newly available broadcast medium that has already attracted programmers including CNBC and Fashion Television. The platform distributes MPEG-4 encoded video and other content via satellite, with a terrestrial return path for ordering material. TV signals are streamed on request at around 1.5 Mbps and viewed either in full screen on a PC or routed to a conventional television with a video-out card in the computer. Open Skies is still new and consumer adoption will be key to the ability of channels such as TVHello to attract the advertising revenue that will support them. Pereira concedes that the initiative is new but says all signs are encouraging. European ISPs, for example, are offering bundled packages of DSL and satellite TV. "I think that’s where it’s going with TV and computers, it’s all kind of coming together and most carriers are saying it’ll hit them," Pereira says. "Why even pay for the bandwidth on MPEG-2 when you can go to MPEG-4 and a quarter of the bandwidth. High-definition TV on MPEG-4 is about 1.1 or 1.2 and it’s around 10 Mbps on MPEG-2. It really is a new technology. Of course there will probably be a little bit of loss of quality from MPEG-2 but then there’s a loss in quality from analog. I’m sure a few years from now they’ll improve it and do better and it’ll be just as good." The company has office and server space in the One Atlantic Avenue building in the King/Dufferin area of Toronto and will use an exclusive 18 GHz microwave frequency to send its signal to a Hamilton uplink station. The company has consciously chosen to avoid the overhead of studio space for the time being. "I think, for us, the key is our costs are very low," Pereira says. "That’s what it really comes down to. We don’t have a studio at the moment. We have some people who are interested in doing sort of an ethnic station but that’s much more involved. What we do, it’s all digital. We just have a couple of racks of servers. We put everything on there. We have some play-out software. But once you get into the studio end of things, there’s a lot more management of it. You have the physical aspect of it." Pereira puts the cost of the venture in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range. He stresses that several months of testing are still ahead and that a summer launch isn’t firm until he and his partners have confirmed the technical aspects of broadcasting the signal. TVHello does not require a broadcast licence since the format falls under the CRTC’s 1999 New Media Exemption Order.

Toronto startup to tap MPEG-4 market in Europe with specialty programming

Broadcast | 03/21/2003 5:00 am EST

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