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Live, wireless, Internet TV takes it to the street

Heather, Dave and Doug do their best work out of the back of a van in a parking lot on a busy downtown Toronto street, and they encourage investors to watch and participate.

The crew of WorkdayTV.com have been broadcasting their 9 to 5 business program via wireless equipment on to the Internet for the past two months, proving that shoestring Internet broadcasting can be more than just a pipe dream. “We are the first in the world, live, wireless Internet TV station,” WorkdayTV.com president Paul Bliss said.

Staffing is minimal, the van tends to get hot and stuffy, and parking costs are horrendous. Hosts Dave Garnett, Doug Glazebrook and Heather Cheifetz admit to going a bit nutty after eight hours in a 16-foot late model cube van stuffed full of computers and digital cameras. “We’re loopy. It gets really hot in here and we start losing our minds,” said Cheifetz.

The show’s content is a mixture of interviews with mutual-fund managers, economists, chief executives of up-and-coming technology companies, market updates and business related banter among the hosts. Guests that show up for interviews might be taken aback by the studio’s entrance way — the van’s sliding metal loading door (the reverse side of which serves as the studio backdrop) — but once inside, they marvel at the concept. The show is interactive.

Viewers can send e-mails directly to a producer in the van, asking questions of the guests while the broadcast takes place. Hard numbers on viewership haven’t been compiled, but the show’s producers claim hundreds of thousands of hits, and e-mail from as far away as Europe and Asia.

Traditional television broadcasters are watching WorkdayTV’s progress closely, as the low-cost, street-level broadcaster is delivering content that has traditionally been the fiefdom of the million-dollar studios. “Some places (news outlets) chose not to do stories on us. They all know this is the way of the future. TV will be on the Internet, and it’s a threat to traditional broadcasters,” Bliss said.

WorkdayTV is the brainchild of Bliss, Lawrie Yakabuski and Garth Turner, a personal-finance writer and also a former revenue minister in the government of Canada. The Internet broadcaster has been profitable since day one, with an impressive list of sponsors including Bank of Montreal’s Investorline discount brokerage, TD Waterhouse, Marathon Mutual Funds and Yorkton Securities, Bliss said.

Said Brendan Kyne, a portfolio manager for Triax Asset Management and occasional guest: “It has the capability to be successful, but they need to improve quality, which is driven off bandwidth constraints, and they need good content. “From a profitability perspective it’s good, because the costs involved are minuscule. We’re going to see the blending of television and the computer, and when that happens, then the ability for people to watch that form of broadcast will increase,” Kyne added.

WorkdayTV broadcasts original content. It requires no broadcasting license and raises no legal issues. Transmission from the van is wireless, using the unlicensed 2.4 gigahertz spectrum, enabled by Canada’s Wi-Lan Inc.’s Hopper infrastructure.

A return signal gives the three-person crew real-time Internet, e-mail and financial news through a Bloomberg terminal. The signal is assembled within the van itself, encoded into a streaming media format, and beamed to a network connected to the Internet, where viewers can see the show from their computers using RealPlayer 7 software, said WorkdayTV’s chief technology officer William Stratas. “We have this very rich two-way environment. The truck is fully communicating globally, even as it sits there. All media encoding and RealPlayer streaming occurs in the trck,” said Stratas.

Next on the agenda for WorkdayTV is to try to get a transmitter on Toronto’s CN Tower, the world’s tallest free-standing structure, so the van can move around the city and transmit content from the entertainment district. Bliss said the WorkdayTV concept can be easily replicated, and Tokyo and New York are on his list of expansion sites.