Hockey viewers have opportunity to sit in the director's chair by William Houston
Source : Globe & Mail
December 19, 2003
Tomorrow night, television viewers will be able to sit in the director's chair and produce their own hockey telecast.
At least, that's the idea behind a new interactive service called Hockey Night in Canada Plus.
The application, developed by Bell ExpressVu, will allow most subscribers to choose which pictures and video feeds to watch during the CBC's Hockey Night in Canada doubleheader.
''It's like having the best seat in the house,'' said Paul Nathanielsz, ExpressVu's senior director of marketing. ''But it's better than that, because you're able to choose different camera angles.''
By using the remote, ExpressVu dish owners will have five basic options. The first is called the Alternate-Cam, which will provide the viewer with the Net Cam picture or robotic camera angle above the goal light. The second, and potentially the most popular, will be isolated camera shots on key players.
Also on the menu: continuous highlights, a statistics package and something called a second-look cam, which will give viewers a final look at a replay.
At any level of new media, this is cutting-edge technology. There's nothing like it in television for baseball or basketball, although there have been a few applications used on DirecTV, a U.S. dish system, for football.
NASCAR gives viewers in-car camera options. And, in England, the BSkyB's digital telecasts of soccer's premier league provide player isolations.
''We're excited, because it is the first of its kind in North America,'' said Doug Perlman, the senior vice-president of television and media for the National Hockey League.
But HNIC Plus will be available to a relatively small viewing audience. Of ExpressVu's 1.35 million subscribers, only 700,000 own receivers -- models 3100, 5100 and 5800 -- with interactive capabilities.
The service is clearly geared toward the younger, multitasking ''lean forward'' consumer. The passive viewer will probably stick to the conventional main screen, but ExpressVu and its NHL and CBC partners are betting that there is a large enough market to support this sort of the technology.
ExpressVu president Tim McGee said new applications will evolve. ''Now that we've got the capability, I'm very confident we will continue to drive the innovation,'' he said.
''We have a whole in-house team that works on this stuff.''
At this point, Hockey Night producers will decide which isolated player shots are made available. In the future, additional cameras could focus on several players.
Then the viewer could decide. Another application could be cameras in the dressing room or on the benches.
''As a consumer, you want to have the world's greatest remote control,'' said Joel Darling, the executive producer of Hockey Night in Canada. ''With this, we're kind of moving down that road.''
It's also a marketing tool for ExpressVu, which competes for digital subscribers with the Star Choice dish system as well as cable distributors.
ExpressVu will provide HNIC Plus free of charge on Channel 276 for the first four weeks.
After Jan. 10, it becomes a pay-per-view service -- $29.99 for the duration of the regular season; $109.99 for the regular season and playoffs; $99.99 for the playoffs only; or $4.99 for a regular-season game and $7.99 for a playoff game.
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