Montreal: Bell Canada unit Bell Nexxia is launching a new fibre-optic video distribution service geared to the transport requirements of the broadcast and film and TV production industries.

The service expects to grow into a $100-million-a-year business within the next four or five years, promising important time and cost-savings for producers, post-producers and other clients.

As it rolls out, Nexxia’s realtime, digital video distribution service will allow executive producers and broadcast commissioners to screen rushes within hours of their origination across the continent, or transmit new footage for additional manipulation – editing, audio production or digital special effects – within a distant post-production network.

Going forward, Bell Nexxia will be looking to leverage its service to deliver motion picture "copies" to theatres across the continent, says Greg Davey, associate director, technology development, Bell Canada.

The Nexxia distribution service operates on Bell’s advanced ATM broadband network and is immediately available in 10 North American cities – New York, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Chicago, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, San Francisco and Los Angeles – with Washington DC, Miami and Seattle expected to come online later this year.

In an interview with Playback from last week’s VidTranS’01 conference, the annual video transport industry trade show in Universal City, CA, Davey said clients signing up for the service will need a digital video local loop and interface connecting their facilities to a local TV operation centre. The local loop is rented at a monthly rate, in the order of $4,000 or less, for the bi-directional 270-megabyte-per-second service. Rates are distance-insensitive and are based on a time per usage charge, ranging from $400 an hour to $1,500 an hour for the full 270-megabyte service.

The package includes a terminal jack-strip or panel for the uncompressed 270-megabyte video signal, the analog or AES audio, and linear timecode. "You can come right off of your desk and go tape-to-tape to the other end of the country," says Davey.

Davey says talks have been held with Pacific Bell to ensure compatibility and standardization. The service will be repped in the U.S. by Teleglobe, which Davey says "is in the midst of a massive fibre build in the U.S. to give us access and bandwidth to cities we can’t access right now."

One of the initial Nexxia video distribution demonstration tests ran from the Manhattan Transfer facility in New York to TOYBOX in Toronto and post houses in London, Eng. "[The demonstration] included doing a live digital edit from TOYBOX right off a Quantel Henry," Davey says. *

-www.bellnexxia.com

-www.vidtrans.org