Sari Ruda, president of Xybermedia, is certain Category 2 will best serve her five digital specialty applications (all wholly owned by Xybermedia): after all, she says, viewers will want access to the channels so much they won’t mind paying a premium. ‘Instead of many channels, we will see single channels at higher prices,’ says Ruda. ‘So if the consumer wants to pay $5, $10 or $15 for absolutely excellent channels they can do so; they’re not forced to have a block of channels to get at the ones they really want. I think that if people can make up their own package, that’s fine: we will stand or fall on content.’

For the Xybermedia applications, content is king.

‘We’ve always been interested in the idea of specialty channels. We’ve been working since 1998 on forming agency relationships because we believed the day would come when people would be able to buy these channels, and we extended those relationships into partnerships. We think we have the market cornered on the best channel. We’re going to be doing original Canadian content here and sending it back out.’

alt-tv – aimed at the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community – is a concept Ruda says she has been working on since 1997.

‘We thought there’s a huge market here, loosely 10% of the population that would fall into this group. We wanted to produce something that is by the community for the community, which makes our application very different from what’s out there already. We want to have as many people from the community involved as possible.

‘We believe it’s an alternative lifestyle channel, it’s a parallel lifestyle channel. We believe people don’t want to go to Rogers and Shaw and say, ‘Hey, we’re gay.’ It’s a private thing. It’s not a political statement, it’s a lifestyle.’

Even the name of the channel came from community consultation. ‘We were going to call it Gay tv, but we got rapped on the knuckles for that. We hadn’t anticipated that sort of response, so we learned from it.’

Continuing community consultation is an important element of the alt-tv application.

‘Just because someone is of the impression that gay people are into fashion and movies and interior decorating therefore we should go to the Home and Garden channel [for programming], we don’t want to do that because we want it to have a real gay/lesbian/bi/transgendered slant to it. We want to do all kinds of lifestyle, cultural type things. The whole thrust of the design of programming is to come from this group [the viewership], not from canned programming.’

Also in Xybermedia’s basket of digital applications are two foreign-language channels: Balkan Express and Luso! tv.

Balkan Express is aimed at what Ruda says is a large population of expats.

‘We represent two channels from Yugoslavia. There’s a huge need [for programming] for former Yugoslavian people and people from the Balkans.’

Even the stipulations for Canadian content are not likely to be troublesome for the channel, Ruda says. ‘Because of the exodus, because of the war, there are some remarkable people here with huge experience that we’ll be able to hire.’

Luso! tv, a mixed-content Portuguese channel, is to be programmed with the help of several channels already broadcasting to that community.

‘People from foreign countries desire strongly to see and hear things from home: landscapes, cities, humor, all those things; you miss a lot. We want to bring the best of things from home and meld it with good programming from here.’

The remaining two Xybermedia applications are also to be put together with considerable overseas input.

F, Fashion is to be, Ruda says, ‘a Canadian version of the original Paris fashion channel. We have an agreement with a channel from Paris and have agreed that Canadian content here will go back to the international channel.’

And Landscape, a relaxation channel that blends attractive landscape scenes with classical and popular classical music, is based on a channel started 12 years ago in England.

Xybermedia’s category 2 applications are supplemented with two in conjunction with an Indian channel headquartered in Bombay. Both channels – Zee TV Canada, which is to broadcast general tv, and Zee Gold, which focuses on movies – are to run in Hindi and Urdu and in both instances Xybermedia is the controlling partner. *

-www.crtc.gc.ca