International distributors know the strength of their companies and their future balance sheets depend on the quality and quantity of content in their program libraries. Broadcasters looking to strengthen audience loyalty on-air know they have to bring viewers along on multi-platform experiences – specifically, from the tube to the Net or vice versa. But since broadcasters can only distribute online programming for which they hold the rights, they look to in-house catalogues as an important (and thrifty) way to extend their on-air branded content online.

While you might expect an educational broadcaster to leverage in-house shows online, TVOntario has gone one step better. It plans not only to reconfigure its ‘rich archive’ of Saturday Night at the Movies interviews for the pleasure of webbies, it will also package the SNAM interviews with other material to create an online, for-credit film studies course.

Rudy Buttignol, creative head of documentaries, drama and network for TVO, says the first step in the plan is to have the new media division launch an enhanced website for SNAM by September. The division will continue working with the Film Studies Association of Canada to further develop the site so that by January 2002, film students can use it for a degree or diploma credit for a first-year course in film history.

Buttignol says SNAM has accumulated 27 years of film interviews, mostly done by redoubtable film connoisseur Elwy Yost, with a few by Yost’s successor Shelagh Rogers. When Rogers left SNAM, Buttignol rethought the in-studio format and created The Interviews, a doc-style, host-less segment that runs between the evening’s first and second features and combines interview footage, text and graphics to give viewers a 15-minute background package.

‘The interviews on TV would serve the needs of our entire Ontario audience,’ says Buttignol. ‘But the background research and the extended interviews online would be co-ordinated with the film schools. The Web has been available [to us as an educational broadcaster],’ he notes, ‘but we’ve never been able to use its enhanced components to such a great extent until now. With the Web, there’s a way to extract the educational information and deliver it in conjunction with an educational degree-granting institution.’

While TVO is eyeing other catalogues as seed material for credit courses – literary series Imprint is one possibility – a more immediate move that melds on-air, online and on-education is eShorts. Buttignol programmed the top-and-bottom-of-the-clock-between-program times, previously filled by interstitials, with short film programming. eShorts, many of which are two to three minutes long, also flow naturally to and from the Web.

Blair Dimock, interim head of TVO’s new media division, points to Get a Life as an example of content commissioned for multiple platforms. The project is a 30-minute TV series focusing on career profiles (produced by Ottawa’s Sound Venture Productions), that will stream clips on a planned website, and flow them as well onto TVO as eShorts. The deal made between TVO and Sound Venture principal/ producer Neil Bregman envisions multi-platform use for his program material from the outset, thus mooting issues of ownership of Internet rights.

Thanks in part to its educational bent, TVO has always emphasized its kids and teen programming, and is doing likewise with its online activities and educational opportunities. Last fall, TVO added a separate drawing card for the elusive tween (eight-12) viewers with the launch of its block The Underground, featuring a cyberhost called Sky.

Dimock says ‘she’s a key character on the website’ and visitors like to interact with her. For TVO, as with other kid-friendly casters, TV blocks, with or without cyberhosts, are driving huge numbers to the Web. ‘It’s a really powerful way for us to generate use of our Web opportunities,’ he adds. ‘For January, we averaged in the range of 700,000 page views on the children’s sites.’

-www.tvo.org