iCrave TV Pushes Boldly Ahead - Company Business and Marketing

When renegade entrepreneur Bill Craig set up a video streaming business in Toronto called iCraveTV, com, which redirected feeds from U.S. TV stations to Canadian Internet users, he did so because the Canadian government basically said he could.

But when the Motion Picture Association of America, backed by the biggest media, sports and entertainment companies, jumped down his throat, he decided to settle out of court rather than rack up hefty legal fees. The Web site had been in operation a mere 62 days.

"We were put in a position where discretion was the better part of valor," Craig said recently in a telephone interview. "So we decided that we should stop the over-the-air live streaming until the laws change in the U.S."

But in the aftermath, members of the MPAA coalition who logged onto the iCraveTV site expecting to get an error message would be sorely disappointed. Rather than stick his head in the sand and wait for some other hungry entrepreneur to make a go at his business, Craig has decided to lick his wounds and push ahead.

He still owns the iCraveTV, com URL, the logo and everything else that would make a viable business. And he still has the dream of being the guy who gives Web surfers the free American television feeds they want.

"This is probably a glimpse of what's around the corner," said Mark Quigley, an analyst with the Yankee Group in Canada. "If iCraveTV is able to sufficiently target the audience that they're enabling to access the material, there's probably a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow on both ends."

Once technological problems are solved and only a certain restricted group of people can access the programming, former litigants could turn into business partners.

Craig is working on technology that will protect the interests of the rights holders so he can relaunch his business.

"The very companies that were arguing against iCraveTV's operations would probably be most interested in that," Quigley said. This could lead to licensing agreements for Craig's technology from companies that want to offer the same type of service.

That effort is not lost on Craig.

"The fundamental point is that over the last 100 years the movie and television industry has built a distribution system that uses borders and territories, and they tend to be national territories," Craig said. "When CBS buys Frasier, for example, they only have the rights for it in the U.S. Even CBS can't go on the air over the Internet because of this border problem."

If it wasn't for the ubiquitous nature of the Internet, Craig believes there would be a lot more videostreaming in cyberspace. He saids that the most prevalent video streaming on the Net today consists of pornography, public domain movies or Broadcast.com-type shows. But even the latter is being restrained, he noted, because sports teams aren't allowing Web sites to stream video clips that could be seen on the local broadcast television news program.

"The Internet has to figure out how to provide the program supplier with comfort enough that they want to participate," Craig said.

[GRAPH OMITTED]

RELATED ARTICLE: Good Walls Make Better Neighbors

iCraveTV.com's founder Bill Craig is working up a couple of novel ideas to get back into the business of streaming television broadcast signals to Canadian Web audiences.

If just Canadian Internet subscribers accessed iCraveTV.com, his business would have been legal in Canada. But there was no way to keep out other Net surfers. And universal access was designed as one key underpinning of the Internet.

So to make his business model a success, Craig is working on a couple of technologies. One is called iWall.

"iWall is a technique where we can implement our server to correctly identify with a greater than 99% accuracy rate that the user of that computer is in Canada or in the U.S.," Craig said. "This will liberate a tremendous amount of product for the Internet."

The company is current testing the product. Craig says that iWall, which doesn't require any additional hardware for the computer user, is currently about 75% completed. However, the system will require hardware and software, at the server end, according to Craig.

But Craig's not stopping there.

He's also building on the concepts of local and wide area computer networks. If Craig can follow through with his dreams, there will soon be a special network called a Country Area Network, or CAN. Craig hopes to patent and launch a CAN network by May.

Craig said iCraveTV is talking about the iWall concept to several Canadian cable networks. iCraveTV is being encouraged to develop these novel technological concepts because of the deregulation of new media by the Canadian Radio-Television and Communications Commission, the Canadian equivalent of the FCC.

"There are no restrictions on us," Craig says confidently a number of times. His take on the regulatory climate in Canada is backed up by the analysts who closely watch the sector.

"The CRTC doesn't have a problem with distribution over the Internet," said Yankee Group analysts Mark Quigley.

For iCraveTV, Quigley believes the CRTC will focus on the percentage of Web-casted programming originating from within Canada's borders rather than in the U.S. or elsewhere.

"It's a statement of the management of iCraveTV that despite this huge setback, they still see that there's great potential," Quigley said. "It is something that is difficult to do, but one would assume that it's not an insurmountable chore."

RELATED ARTICLE: Surfing Cheaters Will Be Prosecuted

iCraveTV.com's original system for keeping non-Canadians from its Web site of U.S. TV station-streamed signals was for the user to enter his or her Canadian area code.

But a simple visit to 555-1212.com, however, could easily supply any savvy Web surfer with the needed information to view Craig's site. This is precisely what drew the ire of the Motion Picture Association of America when it sued the popular Web site.

If Craig can successfully implement his "second tier" approach to keeping out the rest of the world (see above), those Internet users who crack the system could run face first into the tong arm of the law.

That's because of a clause in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 speaks to "circumvention of copyright protection systems." The section states: "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title,"

According to a recent article in The New York Times, the law has already been put to use against a 16-year-old Norwegian boy who cracked the protection code to a DVD movie, even though it was for his own private viewing use.

Web stream viewers would be wise to tread cautiously in the coming digital age, especially if they are prone to sneaking in the back door.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Copyright by Media Central Inc., A PRIMEDIA Company. All rights reserved.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group