While broadcasters today are universally aware of the Internet’s potential to help maximize the value of their existing brands, Toronto-based ChumCity International could sense something big might be brewing as far back as six years ago, when they formed ChumCity Interactive, the company’s online content division.

According to Maria Hale, managing director of ChumCity Interactive, ‘We weren’t too sure what the true power or direction of this Internet tool was going to be, but we thought we’d try it.’

MuchMusic was the first of the broadcaster’s stations to offer an Internet tie-in. But in the early days of the World Wide Web, this type of marketing device was, for the most part, a novelty.

‘[The technique] way back when was just to throw up a wwwdot address, and people would go there out of curiosity,’ Hale says. ‘People are beyond that now. I’m a consumer, I’m an average person – tell me what I’m going to get if I go to your website. What is the value for me?’

Viewers/Web surfers can now visit individual online destinations relating to seven more of ChumCity’s stations, including: www.citytv.com; www.bravo.ca; www.muchmoremusic.com; www.spacecast.com (for Space the Imagination Station); www.star-tv.com; www.clt.ca (Canadian Learning Television); and www.pulse24.com.

Each of the sites offers streaming video content with full sound, because, as Hale explains, ‘we’re a broadcaster, and that’s our true vein. We don’t have a lot of existing material in print form, so the nature of our sites tends to be very visual, very video-based, and it lends itself more closely to a broadband experience.’

The Citytv site offers information bytes relating to news, movies, and music – the station’s three main areas of focus. While there is some text, such as the latest movie box office and video rental figures, visitors can also watch movie trailers or the latest Speakers’ Corner clip, or they can select from a Speakers’ Corner archive.

Interactive audience experience

Hale insists ChumCity didn’t want to use the sites simply to advertise television product.

‘It’s less about promoting the specific shows,’ she says. ‘We wanted to avoid becoming a digital tv guide. It’s about extending our brands online, to improve and enhance an audience experience.’

Interactivity is behind the early success of the recently-launched pulse24.com site, which complements the all-news multi-screen CablePulse24 specialty service. The site features 120 traffic cameras set up throughout Toronto, as well as news reports that are accessible story-by-story, as opposed to having to sit through an entire newscast.

‘It’s not just streaming the channel [on pulse24.com],’ Hale explains. ‘It’s actually taking advantage of the Web in the way it’s meant to be used. Provide [visitors] with information on demand, games, polls, a communication device to allow them to interact not only with us but with each other, and I think you’ve got a successful tool.’

Hale estimates that prorated over one month, pulse24.com would have over one million page views, and that it receives 30-50 e-mails daily, ‘of which 70% to 75% are completely in favor of what we’re doing.’ Although the majority of site visitors are from the Toronto area, she has been surprised by the number of ‘ex-pat Canadians who have heard about the site through word of mouth, and [use it] to keep in touch with news and goings-on in Toronto.’

She adds that many e-mails have favorably reviewed the news streaming, most likely because the video content is not a time-consuming undertaking for the surfer.

‘You can do a letter, do your budget on your Excel spreadsheet, go back to [the news reports] and not have missed any key elements of the plot,’ she explains.

PC vs. TV?

Hale believes these information or entertainment bytes are better suited to the pc than the webcast of entire television programs or feature films, which the industry is also carefully looking at.

Back in January, ChumCity Interactive representatives visited the headquarters of software provider iMagictv in Saint John, n.b., to see that company’s trial airings of traditional tv channels via telephone lines to pcs.

‘We saw the quality – it’s frightening how good it is,’ Hale recounts. ‘And it’s not the 2-inch-by-2-inch box – you actually get a bigger visual.’

She doubts however that this delivery system will pose a threat to traditional tv broadcast, which itself is due for a massive changeover, with digital high definition television on the near horizon.

‘[People today] are interacting with everything, from Palm Pilots and bank accounts to God knows what else,’ she notes. ‘When you go home at the end of the day and you want to be entertained, I firmly believe people are still going to seek out that passive feed. It comes down to the ergonomics of furniture – how long do you want to sit at your desk and watch a movie?’

Nonetheless, she is waiting for viewers to make up their own minds. ‘I’m not going to try to tell consumers that this is what they want,’ she says. ‘I would much prefer they tell me, and then move forward that way. If they’re going to tell me they want to watch a two-hour Bravo! movie at their computer, then I’ll be damned if I’m not going to give it to them.’

Many feel the technology to stream even brief video clips must improve before the interactive experience begins to achieve its full potential. The ChumCity websites recommend a 56K modem to view their video content, but surfers may find the experience frustrating even at that speed.

muchmusic.com facelift

The design of websites, which ChumCity Interactive performs in-house, requires occasional updating, as was the case last fall with their most popular destination, muchmusic.com.

‘It was becoming a big scrolling situation,’ Hale explains. ‘We were putting so much new content up on the site, and the way it had been originally designed didn’t allow for it to grow or scale properly.’ She says the new easier site navigation ‘has been very well received – by advertisers as well.’

The muchmusic.com site currently accounts for 50 to 60% of the 10 million monthly page views Hale says ChumCity gets across its properties.

Hale believes ‘It’s receiving more hits than some of the other Web properties simply because that audience is that much more Web savvy, and that much more accepting of the new technology.’

Further, a study titled ‘Youth Culture’s Report on the Net Generation’ designed by Northstar Research, touted as the largest-ever telephone survey of Canadian teens, lists muchmusic.com as the number-one Web destination for that demographic with the exception of international search engines, chat and e-mail sites.

Web influences TV

While ChumCity Interactive’s websites have relied on their companion tv stations for video material, the popularity of the Web destinations has begun to influence the tv content as well.

Case in point is MuchMusic’s Thursday two-hour Go with the Flow feature, which, according to Hale, is the broadcaster’s ‘truly tv-and-Internet-merged program.’ The show’s format is being rethought to develop ‘more completely interactive segments, whether it’s a game show or something truly unique that would allow the user to participate with the vj in our environment online.’

With new media technology so readily accessible, it might seem a broadcaster such as ChumCity would be concerned over the cyber-competition from limitless webcaster start-ups. Not so, says Hale, who believes companies with established brands have the edge.

‘The guy on the corner can’t get John Travolta to come into his building and do an interview, like we had recently,’ she offers. ‘It takes a long time to build up a reputation and have that credibility. And now that we have it, we can also extend it to ensure their name and their own brand – such as the brand of ‘John Travolta’ – will not be abused if they allow us to give them some promotion on our websites as well.’

Hale ultimately sees new media as profitable in several ways. ‘We want to make sure it’s ‘win win win,” she says. ‘The audience benefits by getting an additional value from their experience with our brands, an advertiser [benefits] by getting their name and their brand out in front of an audience, and we benefit by getting some revenue.’

She sees the focus of new media as turning away from the technology to ways of taking advantage of it, noting, ‘It’s less about ‘Let’s talk about the Internet,’ and more about ‘How can Chum leverage everything that it does, particularly around its brands, using new media technologies?’ I think the future of interactive will be along those lines – we’re very open-minded.’