What is the future of television in the interactive era? Is the Internet a tool that will help the traditional broadcaster drive viewership and add value to its audience experience, or does it threaten to take over the market from them? These are some of the questions on the table at Convergencetv.com, a Playback-produced conference scheduled for Aug. 9-10 at Toronto’s Hilton Hotel.

Convergencetv.com will assemble some of today’s key players in new media for nine sessions that will try to define the present and future roles of the tv set and the home computer.

Some argue that with ever-improving streaming video technology and the forthcoming arrival of digital tv and its interactive potential the functions of these two appliances are becoming indistinguishable. Others believe that after a hard day at the office, you just want to crash on the couch and be entertained – you don’t want to interact with your remote control beyond selecting a channel and turning off your brain.

To turn on our brains before the conference, Playback presents the Convergencetv.com Report, which looks at these very issues. The Internet is a new delivery tool many of us have in our homes, and it provides a fresh medium for people to get their messages out there, no broadcast licence required. What will drive traffic to your site is the quality and nature of your content, which provides a challenge to the traditional broadcaster and Internet startup alike.

There are no absolutes in these nascent days of convergence tv. ‘It’s an ongoing story,’ one Internet company executive told us, ‘but it’s a fun place to be.’

www.convergence-tv.com

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YTV has a wired core viewership, and the children’s broadcaster believes that gives its online ventures the leg up on the competition.

‘Our audience is the converged audience,’ says Steve Rolufs, director of new media for Corus Entertainment, ytv’s parent company. ‘Kids entering our demographic don’t remember a world without the Internet. So in one way we have an advantage, but in another way we have a challenge, because they’re harder to please. They have a shorter attention span and they’re a lot more critical of content than people who aren’t so techno-savvy.’

According to Rolufs, visitors to www.ytv.com are spending an average of 16 minutes on the site, a statistic that makes the broadcaster particularly proud.

‘The revisit rate and the overall traffic on the site is increasing, so we seem to be meeting the challenge, but it is a continual challenge. You’ve got to keep reinventing yourself and keep new, compelling content on the site to keep them coming back, because if you turn them off they’ll be gone [forever].’

Part of holding children’s attention means providing streamlined site navigation.

‘[Kids] don’t like things to get in the way of their experience and what they want to get to,’ Rolufs says. ‘So you can’t have a convoluted or complex navigation scheme. That’s why we added our ‘nav’ bar at the bottom of the screen, which lets you warp to any part of the site very quickly.’

The ytv site debuted in March 1997 with the primary intention initially of driving visitors to ytv’s on-air product with program descriptions, artwork and background information. Another aspect of the strategy focused on extending the tv experience and giving viewers additional value.

‘If they’re interested in a show and they happen to come into it in the middle of the season, they can go to the site and get the whole back story on all the characters and read all the synopses of episodes they’ve missed,’ Rolufs points out. ‘The more we can please our audience by doing that the better.’

A third objective for the site – and the direction ytv is now most interested in pursuing – is making it a destination in and of itself. This includes creating Web characters unrelated to the on-air programs as well as offering experiences viewers could not get through the tv medium.

One such experience was a virtual ‘water fight’ tied in with toy manufacturer Hasbro to promote its Super Soaker water guns.

‘I could send you this e-mail that appeared to be very covert that said, ‘Hi, it’s from me and here’s something I think you should take a look at’ and you got virtually ‘soaked’ with a Flash movie,’ Rolufs explains. ‘You could pick different levels that you could pump your water gun, and then once you were soaked you could choose to soak the person back.’

Rolufs thinks this type of promotion both elevates sponsor recognition and gives kids a media-related game they enjoy that is not purely a commercial message.

‘You won’t see banner ads all over our site,’ he says. ‘You’ll see an area that’s very focused, that’s upfront and says, ‘This is a contest and promotional area’ and ‘this game is brought to you by this manufacturer’ and has their product integrated in.’

While tv is regulated in terms of how companies can advertise to children, the Internet remains a grey zone. Nonetheless, a well-known broadcaster such as ytv has a reputation to uphold and there are some guidelines to which it can refer.

‘There are things like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in the u.s., which is more around acquisition and use of information related to kids – when you’re gathering info about them, how you reveal what you’re doing and who you give that info to,’ Rolufs says. ‘Also, we’re a member of the Concerned Children’s Advertisers and are working with them, but it’s not regulation so much as self-regulation.’

The Internet opens up a worldwide market a national broadcaster could not otherwise reach, and Rolufs reports that feedback mechanisms through e-mail and forms on the site reveal that ytv.com is attracting many foreign visitors. These surfers usually come to the site via search engines when looking up shows such as Pokemon, Dragonball z and Buffy the Vampire Slayer which ytv happens to carry.

‘What we hear more often than not is ‘This looks like a really cool tv station – how can I get this?’ ‘ he says. ‘Maybe there isn’t a dedicated kids station in their country, or the kids station [they have] doesn’t have the same type of programming. As well, we get a lot of feedback from the u.s., Britain and Australia on the original [interactive] content.’

Rolufs believes there is a universal quality to children, which is already reflected in the broadcaster’s on-air offerings. He notes, ‘ytv acquires and even develops programming from all over the world that’s targeted at kids all over the world. You see programs from Japan, Australia, and Sweden [aimed] at kids internationally, and we reflect a lot of the look, feel and positioning of those programs [on the site].’

There is an e-commerce area on the site called Store Galore, yet Rolufs explains its benefit to the broadcaster lies more in building the brand than generating immediate revenue.

‘It’s about putting our audience and our fans in touch with some ytv premiums and merchandise so that if they want a pair of YTV Jr. pajamas or a Fuzz Paw doll, we can help them get it,’ he says. ‘In some cases, [these are] things that aren’t in stores or aren’t widely distributed.’

Conscientious about the way it sells products to children, the ‘ytv webheads’ have designed it so that as the visitor enters Store Galore, a window pops up asking them to make sure they have permission from an adult before proceeding with any transactions.

Traveling downstream

Streaming video has been a part of ytv.com, including the live webcast of the 1999 YTV Achievement Awards one month prior to air date, line flubs and all. The added-value component of the enterprise, which was sponsored by Intel, included featuring backstage segments as well as portions of the program that would be cut from the tv version due to length.

The webcast was delivered using RealPlayer streaming technology. Because of the less-than-broadcast quality of streaming video, ytv.com wanted to provide more than just the footage.

‘To reach a wide audience you really can’t encode [the video stream] at a large screen size or frame rate because you’ve got to reach everyone out there who has a modem,’ Rolufs explains. ‘In the case of an awards ceremony where you’ve got a lot of scenes of the entire stage, you can’t resolve all the action online. So we created an application around the video that while you were watching and listening to the audio we were also giving a scrolling textual commentary and additional information.’

Rolufs foresees strong improvement in streaming video with the rollout of broadband initiatives such as cable modems, high-speed Internet via satellite, local wireless high-speed Internet and Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line systems. adsl takes better advantage of existing phone lines by using most of the channel for the transmission of digital information downstream to the user and only a small part to receive information from the user.

Equally exciting to Rolufs is the future of multicasting.

‘The multicast technology coming down the pike in the next few years will be more akin to broadcasting, where the players and the browsers will be able to ‘tune in’ to a signal on the Web, and the [site] will only have to broadcast one signal,’ he explains. ‘It won’t make any difference to us or to an Internet service provider whether there’s one person watching or 10,000. It makes it a lot more efficient for both the provider and the consumer to take advantage of broadband and video content on the Web.’

Internet technologies keep changing and so does the flavor of websites. The ytv.com site will reinvent itself with Version 3.0 in the fall.

‘We’ve had two very significant launches and those have coincided with the look and feel of ytv,’ Rolufs says. ‘We are going to be relaunching the site again in September to coincide with ytv’s fall season, and you’ll see a complete redesign graphically and a bit of a redesign as far as the navigation and the sections and some of the content.’

Rolufs also sees the interactive features of the computer making a strong impact in the arena of tv broadcasting. ytv and Corus are among those that have recently filed licence applications for digital tv, with the interactive aspect being a key component. Instead of driving tv viewers to their computers during or following a tv program, the broadcaster would rather enable them, if they so desired, to access additional content, information and e-commerce with their remote controls.

But despite these types of crossover features, Rolufs doesn’t ultimately believe in the notion of ‘convergence.’

‘Convergence seems to me to imply a single converged point or line, and I don’t really buy that. I think the whole tv experience – the sitting back, absorbing, hands-off enjoyment of a long-form program – is always going to remain. At the other extreme, the whole lean-in, focused, participatory, quick-hit, shorter format type of experience will also always be there.’ *

-www.ytv.com

-www.cca-canada.com (Concerned Children’s Advertisers)

-www.coppa.org (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act)