Genies see cooperation on ITV from producer, broadcaster and distributor

Interactive television, the red-headed stepchild of new media, is set to come into its own as several powerhouse organizations will offer Genie award viewers an enhanced version of the staid event. In May, the awards will be broadcast on Citytv Toronto, Star!, Bravo!, MusiMax and Access, as well as on ASN in Nova Scotia, with some satellite customers able to participate in live polling, trivia games and to get additional information about the stars and filmamkers of Canadian cinema. Xenophile Media, with Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund assistance, is licensing two interactive versions of the awards show to CHUM Ltd., including the ITV enhancements for customers of an undisclosed direct-to-home satellite TV company, and a web version that will push content in synch with the broadcast to web users. The final result should be an interesting lesson for Canadian broadcast and new media executives in piecing together complex partnerships to deliver enhanced television-related content. A process continues to simmer on the back burner at the CRTC to determine how the nascent technology will be regulated, as broadcasters, distributors and content producers argue about matters such as mandated carriage and CanCon rules. Despite the ongoing and lengthy process in Ottawa, however, Xenophile appears poised to take lessons from this project to other projects including future Canadian awards shows, and is tentatively making overtures to the American market. The enhanced version of the awards, organized and hosted by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, will reward various actors and filmmakers for the best domestic films of the year. Broadcast rights to the awards were bought for the first time this year by CHUM. The broadcaster, which has been a leader in Canada using technologies such as SMS to increase real-time interest in its shows, has lent its full support to the project. The broadcast team has worked with Xenophile since day one to integrate the interactive and television components together, and both are cooperating with teams of writers to create the enhancements including a national, real-time trivia challenge. CHUM’s involvement with the project has also paid off as its sales team has brought General Motors on board as a sponsor. In fact, the challenges appear not so much to have been getting the various partners to work together as they have been technical in nature. The old bugbears of satellite-delivered enhancements have reared their head, though Xenophile partner Patrick Crowe says those are to be expected given the current state of ITV technology. The lack of a reliable back-channel, and some limitations in terms of colour palettes, have had to be worked around. "The next part of this project is when we’re done doing the Genies, we’re going to be doing the Geminis in the fall, which will be on CBC of course. In some ways this is a dry run for them. We’re going to work out a lot of those issues, and we certainly want to address the back channel further on. I think, actually, the satellite providers think it’s valuable to start getting their subscribers to use the back channel. This may be a way to do it," says Crowe Crowe notes that some of the goodwill between the various partners - broadcaster, distributor and producer - is partly because the Genies are a low-stake event in terms of viewership and money. "If it was big money TV bingo, this would be very hard to do because everyone would have their hands out. With this, people think, ah, we’ll forego whatever the ad revenues are now. We don’t need our cut. It’s not that important. I think there would be a different scale if you were dealing with the Oscars." The Flash-generated synchronized broadcast on the web will be available through the Star! web site, as well as through the AOL Canada portal.

Genies see cooperation on ITV from producer, broadcaster and distributor

News | 04/30/2004 4:00 am EDT

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