Bell ExpressVu to introduce interactive sports service, more iTV offerings in the works

Bell ExpressVu LP, the satellite TV distributor that bills itself as a leader in interactive television (iTV), is adding another interactive service to its offerings on October 20. The new TSN Extra service will provide subscribers with on-demand sports news, game results, team standings and player statistics. Customers with either a 3100, 5100, or 5800 interactive receiver will be able to access TSN Extra from Bell ExpressVu’s iTV LaunchPad on channel 275. Subscribers use their remote to scroll through to the sport and kind of information they want to access. TSN Extra will be on free preview for two months, and afterwards will be priced at $1.99 per month. All of the information on TSN Extra will come from TSN’s web site. The sports specialty TV channel is an affiliate of Bell ExpressVu, both owned by BCE Inc. While the information on the web site can be accessed for free, and there are limitations to TSN Extra, the satellite TV operator sees a market for the new interactive service. When it launches, TSN Extra won’t include any video and cannot be viewed on the TV screen at the same time as a sporting event broadcast on another channel. "All the information (available on TSN Extra) is similar to what you’d see on the web site, but it has been repurposed for presentation on the TV screen," Bell ExpressVu senior director of product marketing Paul Nathanielsz tells Canadian Communications Reports. "It’s very much a sit back and relax type of application. It allows you to access information, such as out-of-town scores, without having to go and log onto your computer. You never leave your TV. People are swamped with information, but what they are starving for is for someone to serve it up digestively in a simplified way, and I think that TSN Extra does that. It allows us to serve up this information right to your living room TV." Consumer research conducted recently by Decima Publishing Inc. and Decima Research Inc. found that 44% of those who currently subscribe to iTV services and those who expressed an interest in subscribing are "definitely interested" or "probably interested" in having "the ability to view web page-type content." Interest in this iTV feature ranked second behind "the ability to obtain more information about a program you are watching" – out of a total of four features tested. The target market for TSN Extra is the 35- to 45-year-old male sports fanatic, which Nathanielsz describes as "a fairly significant portion" of Bell ExpressVu’s subscriber base. He adds that the TV sports packages available on Bell ExpressVu are a major draw, second only to movies, so "we’re catering to one of the largest subscriber segments." He draws a parallel between TSN Extra and Bell ExpressVu’s existing interactive weather service, i Weather. The weather service and LudiTV Games are the top two in terms of subscriber numbers of the five interactive applications currently offered by the satellite TV distributor. Nathanielsz says i Weather is so popular partly because the information on it is so simple to access. "Weather information is available on the web, in newspapers, on the radio and on television. But interactive TV weather is popular because it provides customers very easy access to weather information from around the world. So we serve up information that may be available in other means, but we offer it simply and conveniently to customers and that’s what creates the value," he says. For competitive reasons, he would not release subscriber numbers to the i Weather interactive service. He would only note that Bell ExpressVu is "very pleased with the penetration of both those applications (i Weather and LudiTV Games) in the past year and a half they have been up and running." Pelmorex Communications Inc., which operates The Weather Network and MétéoMédia, estimates that there are 75,000 subscribers to Bell ExpressVu’s interactive weather service in a recent undue preference complaint filed with the CRTC. Pelmorex complains that Bell ExpressVu refuses to provide its weather channels with the same interactive capability that it does i Weather (CCR, Sept. 18/03). Bell ExpressVu also currently offers i Trivia, an interactive quiz game for one to four players; i Horoscope, a daily horoscope and advice service; and i Lottery, which provides the lottery results of 29 national and provincial lotteries in Canada. Before the end of the year, Nathanielsz says that Bell ExpressVu will also introduce an iTV service for children consisting of learning games to help them develop reading, problem-solving and thinking skills. It will incorporate familiar animated characters. Nathalie Moreau, a media relations officer with Bell Canada, says TSN Extra is the first in a planned series of iTV offerings that will marry statistics and information with specific genres of channels. "This service is really the first of new interactive services where people will be more and more able to link information to the content that they’re watching. TSN Extra is the first but eventually customers will be able to access information they want to know at the same time as they are watching TV programming," she says. TSN Extra is expected to evolve over time to include video excerpts and a split-screen type of application that would allow viewers to watch a sporting event while simultaneously clicking on buttons at the bottom of the screen to access stats and other information. Nathanielsz points out that Bell ExpressVu will soon also introduce an interactive service that will allow viewers to choose from multiple camera angles of various sporting events, and to easily access replays. He tells CCR that the introduction of the multi-cam application is imminent.

Bell ExpressVu to introduce interactive sports service, more iTV offerings in the works

News | 10/16/2003 4:00 am EDT

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