The September 15th MCA-I meeting was held in the cafeteria of Broadcast ITV in Aliso Viejo.  I must say that this meeting had some of the best food I can recall.  The food was provided by our host, BITV, and the cafeteria people provided excellent service.  We even had wine!  See what you missed if you didn't attend???

President Dennis Backer opened the meeting, and welcomed everyone.  Then Dennis introduced Vice President John Coleman, who in turn introduced Gregory Hilz, the CEO of Broadcast ITV.  greghilz@broadcastitv.com.  Also on hand from BITV were John Bourland, Executive Vice President and Ash Gianni, of their Business Development team.  Thanks to Electric Pictures for providing audio-visual support.

BITV or Broadcast Internet Television will be "on the air" within another month providing businesses with the opportunity to utilize Internet Television for all sorts of things like training, marketing, advertising, live events, pay-per-view, E-Commerce, political campaigning and bi-directional communications.  BITV will be utilizing the same technology that huge content suppliers such as AOL, Telemundo, and NBC are using to send high quality video to millions of viewers on demand.

The high quality videos only require a computer and a broadband connection.   While there are still lots of dial-up connections out there, the number of broadband users has grown tremendously from only 3.2 millions users in 2000 to over 45 million today.  There will be nearly 60 million broadband connected computers by 2005, which represents over 50% of the total households in the US.

Greg Hilz presented a video clip about this service which can be viewed at: http://www.electricpictures.la/images/video/bitv sample.wmv

The web site of BITV is www.broadcastitv.com.

Greg also took us upstairs to see a live video camera feed from New York, to demonstrate the two-way communications capability.  The picture quality was very good considering we were just looking at an Internet connection.  All you need is a small inexpensive video camera for your computer, and you can do video conferencing at a fraction of the cost it used to be years ago.

With BITV selling business on the idea of having their own Internet Television Channel, this could mean lots of extra potential work for video content creators.  In years to come this technology may completely change the way that business utilizes video.  It could possibly eliminate the need for making dubs, for example, as videos can be seen on demand at any time on any computer.

If you would like to see existing Internet Television, you may want to check out http://www.feedroom.com, http://ivillage.feedroom.com, and http://windowsmedia.feedoom.com.  These are just some of the sites that were listed in a handout that BITV provided.  There are also a host of local networks including http://ktla.feedroom.com.