‘You can’t think of us as just a television company anymore – we’re a multimedia content and distribution company,’ proclaims Gary Maavara, vp and gm of new media at CanWest Global. He is referring, of course, to CanWest’s $3.5-billion takeover of newspaper mega-chain Hollinger this summer, which brought the broadcaster not only a large stake in print media, but Hollinger’s Internet properties as well.

These additions bring CanWest’s total number of websites to about 125, including destinations dedicated to such diverse subjects as amateur sport, health and how to plan a wedding.

The flagship Canadian-based site is www.Globaltv.com, whose index page allows the visitor to link to the companion sites of 10 Global Television stations across Canada, as well as other stations CanWest owns, including three in b.c. and Hamilton’s ontv.

The city-specific sites encompass news, weather, traffic, sports, and entertainment information. Maavara admits that at first glance it’s a lot of data for one pair of eyeballs to digest.

‘We’re trying to [provide] a comprehensive perspective on the local community, and that requires us to have a lot of stuff in it,’ he says.

The main page for each city offers about 50 links. Click on a link, and a whole page will open dedicated to that particular story. Maavara wants to dispel the impression the Web is only useful for re-purposed ‘infobytes.’

‘One perception of the Internet is that it’s superficial,’ he says. ‘But every day we produce a website that has more text in it than [many] magazines. And we’re not taking tv script from the newsroom and putting it on the Internet – we have dedicated Web newsrooms.’

That’s nine Web newsrooms across Canada, to be exact. Maavara describes Globaltv.com’s style of reportage as more conversational than newspaper but less conversational than tv script. Although the sites largely offer news in a text format, the Internet provides a sense of immediacy newspapers can’t match.

‘The positioning statement for Globaltv.com is ‘breaking local news,’ ‘ Maavara explains. ‘Our stories are constantly updated ‘breaking stories,’ and we put the time stamp on each article every time we do something to it. That way the reader knows how fresh that story is, and we try to keep them as fresh as we can.’

By offering longer and more up-to-date news items than the morning papers, Globaltv.com is seemingly trying to lure readers away from that traditional form, in which CanWest is now a major investor. Yet the ability for the company to span three major platforms – tv, newspapers and Internet – will no doubt increase interest in the media giant among advertisers.

Maavara believes the nature of the Internet, which allows customers to easily forward comments via e-mail and media companies to monitor the activity of site visitors, makes it an invaluable marketing device for the overall brand.

‘We can gauge very quickly what people like and don’t like, and we get a lot of feedback every day,’ he says. ‘That skill base is going to be very helpful to our traditional media as well, because we’re helping tv and newspapers understand better what their audience wants and needs. That’s definitely an objective of the new media strategy. [Another is] to serve advertisers better.’

The massive infrastructure CanWest has in place, especially in terms of eng, leaves Maavara confident the company won’t be losing eyeballs to Internet start-ups.

‘I respect what [start-ups] are doing, but when you walk around a tv station you see the fixed plant,’ he says. ‘Now we have Web people who are purely dot-coms who want to get video from us because they can’t replicate it themselves. That’s what [the merger of] aol and Time Warner is all about. Video is expensive to produce – it isn’t any cheaper just because it’s on the Web.’

In the past, Maavara has been critical of streaming content on the Internet. ‘[It] is a dumb idea because the technology is not there yet,’ he told Playback last December, referring to the practices of iCravetv. Progress in the past year has brought newfound optimism, however.

‘We’re doing a lot of r&d and testing in the streaming video area and we’re having some interesting results,’ he says. ‘One of the things we’re excited about is our video search, [where] people can go into our archive on the Toronto site and pick out video news they might have missed. But in the context of ‘Is the Internet going to replace tv?’ I don’t see it happening for a significant period of time.’

Another stumbling block, and one Maavara says his new media department deals with daily, is the wide range of technologies available at the consumer level. The situation is quite unlike that of television, where everybody has the same device.

‘I get e-mails from people who proclaim we should have more video and pure broadband content, to people who want us to take the technology of our website down a few notches, because some of the stuff doesn’t work on their old computer,’ he explains.

Regardless of the hardware on the receiving end, CanWest’s new media strategy is to cover as much cyberspace as possible, accounting in part for the Hollinger takeover as well as its stake in interactive companies including Internet Broadcasting Systems, LifeServ Corporation, Medbroadcast Corporation and All Sport Ventures.

As Maavara sums up, ‘We want to be the provider of the sites that will basically give Canadians every kind of information they could possibly be interested in.’ *

-www.Globaltv.com