NEW YORK
(click thumbnail)Broadband IP television is coming to Indian Country. American Indian TV debuted in March at RES2007, the 21st annual National Reservation Economic Summit and American Indian Business Trade Fair, which featured 400 exhibitors and 2,500 attendees from across North America.
"AITV will be a subscription-based service," said Jerry Ashton, president and cofounder of AITV. "All people interested in Native content will serve as the audience. We intend to feature powwows, news, original films by Native filmmakers, educational channels to preserve and protect Indian culture, Native arts and crafts, and much more."
Ashton said the response to AITV was "excellent" at RES2007, which was sponsored by the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development (NCAIED.org), created in 1969 to promote American Indian economic self-sufficiency through business ownership.
AITV grew out of conversations about IPTV between Ashton and Bronx, N.Y.-based Joseph Franklyn McElroy at Corporate Performance Artists.
"I've been developing IPTV deals with various media groups over the past few years," said McElroy, now the CTO and co-founder of AITV, "but I never thought IP video on a computer provided a satisfactory viewing experience. The video was good enough for short clips, but it hardly was worth watching for a half-hour or hour TV show."
Last summer, McElroy was introduced to NeuLion, a Plainview, N.Y. company that's developed an IPTV set-top box with proprietary decoding software, supported from Linux servers, that delivers full-motion video over the Internet at wired or wireless broadband speeds as low as 700 Kbps, with a 500 Kbps box slated for release by this summer.
"I'm technology and content oriented," said McElroy, the former CEO of EveryDayOffice.com and a leader of the Open Source SIG for the New York Software Industry Association. "I'm not easily impressed, but I was blown away by the video quality of the NeuLion set-top."
McElroy said he immediately thought of his friend, Jerry Ashton, who was developing call centers on Native American reservations for American Indian Sourcing.
"I set up a meeting with Jerry and Chris Wagner, the executive vice president at NeuLion, and we discussed focusing on Indian Country as a niche market for IPTV. Jerry and I put together a partnership. Michael Starobin came on board as the CEO. We opened an office [near Gramercy Park] in Manhattan, and that's the genesis of American Indian Television, Inc."
DIGITAL DIVIDE
Michael Starobin was a real catch for AITV. A 30-year broadcasting veteran, he pioneered nonlinear editing with Avid in the 1980s, introduced NLE to the advertising agency market, then brought NLE to Martha Stewart Living in 1994, where he later became senior vice president in charge of all television content until June 2006, when he began talking to AITV.
"There's a deep digital divide on the Reservations," Starobin said. "The desire for broadband is strong among the tribes that do not have it yet, and the response to AITV at RES2007 makes me anticipate building solid momentum going toward crossing that divide."
A number of the eastern tribes have already deployed Internet infrastructure, he noted, but penetration is very low in the Southwest, northern Rockies and up into Alaska.
"While most of those in the older generations do not feel a need for Internet access, the younger generations do, and their talents cannot develop as they could if they had access. For example, distance learning and telemedicine alone would make a big difference," he said.
Starobin said conversations with members of the tribal and intertribal associations at RES2007 convinced him that AITV services will be welcomed on "the Res." He discovered that entertainment and sports programming likely will be popular.
"They want access to pro basketball, and there are a lot members in the boxing organizations," he said.
Producing tribal news to distribute throughout the AITV network will be a top priority, he said. Organizations like NATV.org in Washington, D.C., already are teaching television production skills, he observed, "and the cost of production has come down to the point a good consumer camera and a decent computer are enough to put a news feed together. We envision daily newscasts anchored by popular Native American personalities."
NEULION BOX
What sold Starobin on joining AITV was not only the vision and mission, but the capabilities of the NeuLion box.
"The NeuLion platform is incredibly stable," he said. "I was demonstrating it at Res2007 on the conference floor and in my hotel room, and it did not miss a beat in delivering cable-like video experiences."
NeuLion already has commercial deployments of its system as the foundation for launching AITV, said Jerry Romano, director of business development. Founded by Nancy Li, former chief technology officer of Computer Associates, NeuLion bases its services on the IPTV set-top box manufactured by sister company TransVideo in Beijing. NeuLion also provides a complete backend for the IPTV network, from video servers to billing to customer service.
NeuLion is building its business by offering IPTV to niche markets. Programming services already launched include the flagship KyLin TV for Chinese language audiences in North America, Hawaii TV for the islands, and ABS/CBN for the Philipino market.
"What's really impressive to me," Romano said, "is that the thin-client box supports full DVD functionality with pause, fast-forward and rewind from only a two-minute buffer in the box memory. Everything else is in the network, which makes it very easy to upgrade the system."
Ashton said NeuLion's box and network infrastructure will allow AITV to break even with as few as 10,000 subscriber and then grow from there.
He is not concerned about immediate reach onto tribal lands.
Of the 2.5 million to 5 million people "who call themselves Native Americans, 60 percent of them live in urban areas and already are getting 'Desperate Housewives,'" Ashton said. "My research says we can successfully launch AITV to this market base and gradually expand onto the reservations."
Ashton also is not worried about original content.
"I've found a tremendous wealth of Indian filmmakers who say their main problem is distribution. Right now most of them are selling their DVDs at film festivals or out of the trunk of their cars. I'm convinced from the conversations I had at RES2007 that they will want to distribute their work through AITV."
"I'm still getting my arms around the idea of IPTV, said Randy Ross, a communications consultant who's an enrolled member of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma with family roots in the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota. Ross now heads the North West American Indian Development in Seattle and has begun talking with AITV about deployments on tribal lands.
"IPTV is an interesting emerging venue from video-on-demand over the Internet, and it's much needed," Ross said. "IPTV represents an opportunity to reach audiences that could not be reached before." An example is the Black Hills, where tribal leaders refuse to tolerate broadcast TV towers on top of the sacred mountains.
"AITV is tempering its expectations to match the high levels of poverty on the reservations that hinders network development," Ross said. "For the urban Indians, there is a substantial market base of people who have good jobs and regular income. They're the first market segment to reach."
Ashton said AITV plans to enhance its outreach by inviting tribal members onto its advisory board from the four directions--east, south, west, and north--by the time the network launches commercial services this summer.
"My five-year vision calls for capitalizing AITV by selling 50 percent of the equity to Native Americans, and eventually to have the company totally owned by Natives, who may keep me on for their amusement."
Ashton voiced concern that no single tribe or region dominates the network, such as Southwestern tribes now tend to dominate the Indian art market. Based on the idea that all humanity is related, he said, "Every tribe has the potential to contribute and to benefit. That's why we want every tribe to have a fair say on the development of AITV."
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