The National Film Board will begin offering ‘cinema on demand’ – video streamed in realtime over the Internet – under a project called CineRoute.

Through a six-month, $450,000 pilot project, 100 universities and research institutions across the country have access to select nfb titles. Signals are sent over a national optical super network called CA*net 3, which was funded by the federal budget in 1998.

A total of 800 nfb films are available, says Pierre Ducharme, the man responsible for the research and development of CineRoute.

Ducharme, director of CineRobotheque at the nfb, says the system will be made available to the public via cable modem once the pilot project runs its course at the end of May 2000.

‘Before we start to establish any kind of policy that will give service to more general clientele, we have to know exactly how the networks are working, at what times [of day] will we have problems,’ Ducharme says, explaining the rationale behind the pilot project.

‘This information is necessary when you want to open a service like this,’ he adds, citing other recently launched video services which crashed immediately because their servers did not have adequate capacity.

‘It’s very important that we evaluate many aspects of the project: evaluate the band[width], evaluate the server, evaluate the interface and the reaction of the customer, and the content itself.’

Ducharme adds that deals have to be worked out with network providers to set up access through cable and satellite feeds.

Once that is done, users at home with computers running at a processing speed of at least 200 megahertz will be able to access films streamed in at 200 kilobytes per second.

The only other hurdle will be to set up a server capable of dealing with commercial traffic, which is different from the one used for CA*net 3, Ducharme says.

Universities running computers with at least 300 megahertz will receive signals at a considerably higher file size, 1.6 megabytes per second, over the CA*net 3 network and running at 30 frames per second, Ducharme says. ‘[It] is exactly as if you were viewing a video cassette [in terms of] quality, and you have the full-screen image and it’s accessible instantly.’

The video streamed over cable lines will initially run at 12 frames per second, meaning the resolution will be less fluid, he says.

Films are viewed using the RealPlayer G2 software, which can be downloaded off the Web. While the nfb has been working on CineRoute since 1994, the opportunity to offer it to the public at large came with the release last year of the G2 software.

CA*net 3 is maintained by canarie, a private, not-for-profit organization supported by Industry Canada and the private sector and charged with developing Canada’s communications infrastructure and stimulating next-generation technology.

The nfb is also partnered on the project with Quebec-based Reseau Interordinateurs Scientifiques Quebecois, which runs a similar network provincially to canarie’s national lines.