Broadband opens up a library in the sky

Robert Boyd-Bell calls it "a library in the sky" - a stockpile of educational video material available on tap over the internet.

Boyd-Bell is one of three founders of e-cast, an Auckland-based company specialising in internet protocol television (IPTV), video hosting and streaming with a focus on education.

Expanding the library's catalogue and growing its membership base is part of e-cast's mission.

"We've been working for about five years on trying to push the development of media for better education and communications purposes in New Zealand, labouring under the fairly difficult regime that Telecom and others have kept us under for a while," Boyd-Bell says.

"We finally decided last year that the time was right to take the plunge and get e-cast off the ground."

Boyd-Bell's background is in journalism and education, including stints as head of Auckland University's Audio Visual Centre, joint programme director of the post-graduate diploma in broadcast communication, TVNZ's general manager of educational television, and general manager of production for Communicado.

His e-cast business partners are telecommunications specialist Brian Oliver, a director of Government-owned Transmission Holdings, and Gresham Bradley, who has a background in education programming and production in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Their business has a client list that includes Government departments and health and education organisations, for which they have produced mainly educational material.

"E-cast is a broader concept than that and the focus is on premium quality video streaming," Boyd-Bell says. "Most websites are very heavily text-based and because video demands a lot of bandwidth it's been difficult to bring standard websites and video together very successfully."

E-cast's solution has been to combine a new internet video standard called H.264 with Apple's QuickTime 7 viewing software.

"We can get about twice as much video from the same bandwidth as we could previously," Boyd-Bell says.

Last month e-cast used the technology to launch Hot Science, a website repository of IPTV science education material backed by the Royal Society of New Zealand and funded by a grant from the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology.

One of e-cast's latest ventures is developing a trial for the Ministry of Education to provide selected schools with IPTV feeds via the Government's soon-to-be-launched Research and Education Advanced Network, a national ultra-fast link-up between research and tertiary institutes.

"Because all of this is so new - like IPTV - people talk about it a lot but don't know what it looks like," Boyd-Bell says. "We've done a lot of presentations in the last six months and you can talk to people forever, but it's not until you finally turn the laptop on and go live linking into this stuff that they finally start to understand."

He says e-cast's future is solid because there is little in the way of local experienced competition and budgets for the type of work the company does are larger than those in regular television.

Boyd-Bell says he is encouraged by the Government's recent regulatory moves on Telecom aimed at boosting broadband uptake because low broadband penetration has been a significant barrier for IPTV.

"We're taking advantage of the explosion in broadband that's happening right now and is going to get better in the future. Our timing turned out to be right."

The company also sees a future in using its technology for corporate communication and training.

Boyd-Bell cites examples of a nationwide retailer posting staff training videos about new product launches on its intranet or a listed company posting a video explaining details of a major business development.

"There are a whole range of things like that that we're only just beginning to explore," he says.

E-CAST

Who: Robert Boyd-Bell, executive producer.

Where: Auckland.

What: Provider of internet protocol television, video hosting and streaming services.

Why: "We're taking advantage of the explosion in broadband that's happening right now and is going to get better in the future."