I like to keep up with events in the old country, whcih is how I ran across this item in the Globe and Mail about how one of Canada's largest media companies was getting into the social media game.
Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc. is working on a plan that could soon see Canadians broadcasting their own cooking, gardening and home improvement shows on the websites of The Food Network, HGTV and other channels.
The strategy was unveiled yesterday when Alliance announced a partnership with GS New Media to create BlogTV.ca, a Canadian website patterned after a popular Middle East site that lets people broadcast live through webcams to computers and cellphones.
Alliance Atlantis is licensing the BlogTV service from Israeli company Tapuz, who appear to license the service on a geographic basis, so only Canadian users will be able to access BlogTV.ca (apparently the geolocation service Tapuz uses is a little shaky—I've seen a few Canadian users complain that their access requests were denied because the site was for use by Canadians only). That doesn't sound very web 2.0 to me. Hell, it doesn't even sound web 1.0. Obviously Tapuz wants to sell this thing a bunch of times over, but the geographic limitation of their business model is completely at odds with the way the internet works.
It would appear that the service will initially launch focused on live streaming. In other words, flip on your webcam and, hey-presto, you're broadcasting through BlogTV (BlogTV also allows users to record their broadcasts for later play). The focus on live, unedited video strikes me as weird, although I suppose it's one way to discourage users uploading copyrighted content as they do on YouTube. Unfortunately, it's also one way to discourage users from visiting the site and making it successful, as they've done with YouTube.
I suppose I should thank god it's not actually blog TV—watching people blog would be booooring TV.
It looks like techno-journo-bloggo Matthew "Geekwatch" Ingram doesn't think much of BlogTV either.
In contrast to BSkyB licensing YouTube's platform, this deal is kinda "meh."
Tags: BlogTV, Alliance Atlantis, Tapuz, YouTube