In January 1996, Michael McHale and Keith Holding formed MediaTribe Interactive and today are recognized as pioneers at the leading edge of the world of live multimedia events.

Both come from television backgrounds: McHale has held management positions with CityInteractive, ChumCity International and Alliance Communications in Canada and with D.L. Taffner, BNB International and Universal Services in the u.s., while Holding has spent the last 20 years working in all aspects of tv production, design and technical supervision.

Using what they’ve culled from their years of tv, McHale, president of MediaTribe, and Holding, executive producer, are producing live audio and video, connecting people everywhere via the Internet.

Webcasting is changing the Internet from an electronic publishing medium to an electronic broadcasting medium with an audience surpassing that of cable and satellite channels around the world.

‘On demand or live you are sending out video signals over the Internet,’ explains Holding. ‘When you click on an image a window pops up and in a few seconds you are watching live video. Nothing is downloaded to your hard drive, it just comes through to your screen.’

The cost of this varies depending on the type of Webcast you are putting out.

‘You can take video and just stream it over the Internet, or there is the other extreme of using an entire production team, which could cost over $100,000, but it is still cheaper than traditional methods,’ says McHale.

Among the benefits of Webcasting for corporations is they know immediately how many people are logging on, where they are from and how long they visit.

‘It is a more efficient way for corporations to distribute information to employees and external partners, eliminating the middle man,’ says McHale.

For events such as conventions, McHale and Holding describe Webcasting as an invaluable tool for business as it allows maximum participation at a fraction of the cost.

Live daily broadcasts from NAB 97 in Las Vegas this past April marked the first time that professional-quality, high-impact content was transmitted live via the Internet to the professional broadcast community using Microsoft NetShow networked multimedia software.

MediaTribe’s camera crews gathered footage daily from the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Centre, edited it at the Softimage booth using their new non-linear editing system Digital Studio, and distributed the Webcast on Web servers in North America and Asia.

The show was shot and packaged the day before and run on a constant basis all day, in some cases live, with product demos and student demo reels added in throughout the broadcast.

Following MediaTribe’s work with Softimage and Digital, other large corporations which are already wired up with high-speed connections have taken notice, and although McHale is not at liberty to reveal who they are at the moment, they are keeping MediaTribe busy.

Bandwidth remains an issue.

‘Just for ourselves at 28.8 it gets frustrating sometimes watching the Webcast at those speeds, and that’s why you really need a higher speed connection,’ says Holding. ‘That’s why we are really waiting for the cable companies to come out with cable modems.’

Besides the cable modem, MediaTribe is betting strongly on adsl, a digital service line set to launch in Toronto this fall. Coming out of the telcos, it will give users three times the speed of present-day cable modems.

According to McHale, with all these advances in technology, the whole distinction between television and computer will disappear.

‘The way we do business and the way we communicate will change completely,’ says McHale. ‘Telecommuting will become more popular. We will have more productive time and be able to communicate better while still retaining a sense of presence.’

Other things being developed at MediaTribe include six cd-roms called The Composers’ Specials based on the Emmy award-winning television series from Devine Entertainment, Toronto, and a telepresence robot which they are developing with Toronto company Telbotics.

The idea behind the telepresence robots is to give people who are working at home or children who are stuck in the hospital a sense of presence.

‘The whole theory of telepresence emerged from video conferencing,’ explains McHale. ‘People fear that if they work at home and don’t go into the office that they are going to lose that social presence. With the I2I robot you get a sense of the person’s presence.’

The robot, equipped with a monitor and camera, would be at one end, while the person at the other end would be set up with a high-speed modem, monitor and microphone.

In the case of a hospitalized child, the robot would be in the child’s classroom, with the child’s face appearing on it, and the hospital room monitor would show the child everything, allowing him to feel part of the class.

McHale and Holding are looking at moving their fast-growing operation from McHale’s King Street apartment to an office where they can store the Avid they will be buying to edit for the Internet.

Although they have been working and evolving with the latest developments and stand at the forefront of multimedia development, McHale says they have barely scratched the surface. ‘We haven’t even yet begun.’