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The site, aimed at users in Ireland as well as the estimated 70 million people around the world of Irish descent, officially went live on Friday with An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, TD on hand to launch the project. Ruane, who controls the Anner Media Group and TV production company Like It Love It Productions, says that start up investment costs for the venture were almost EUR6.35 million.
The service will be a 24-hour Internet-based news channel that will stream video and audio news on a continuous feed covering topics such as sport, entertainment, politics and business with more channels to come on-line in later months. The site's news will be repeated and updated every 15 minutes and the company will employ its own journalists and crews. Ireland Live Television News (ILTN) in fact describes the service as "an Irish Sky News."
The service, like traditional broadcasters, will be funded through commercials. But the company says that its ads are interactive and that users will be able to further investigate products and services by clicking on the commercials themselves. The company also has other ideas in mind for financing the business, including selling content to other broadcasters on different platforms such as satellite and cable networks.
While streaming video is expected to become immensely popular in years ahead, infrastructure limitations, especially in Europe, have dramatically slowed the take-up of the service. Furthermore, although ILTN can be viewed via dial-up or ISDN, the company admits that DSL, which is not available in Ireland, will make the service smoother and easier to watch over the Net.
The fact is a number of companies who have attempted similar ventures in recent years, including Pseudo.com in the US and Canalweb in France, have gone bust, and infrastructure limitations were blamed for the failures.
Yet there are signs that the public are turning more to the Web for news. On 11 September, the day that the terrorist attacks were carried out in New York, it is thought that as many as 250,000 streaming videos were delivered to PCs around the world with footage of the attacks.
But after 11 September, the market for streaming video returned to its usual low levels as impatient surfers turned away from the long download times and constant interruptions that can come with streaming video.
In October 2001 CNN.com and BBC.co.uk combined attracted 3,348,000 unique visitors from the UK but only 147,000, or 4.4 percent, took the time to view video clips on the sites, according to recent research from Jupiter MMXI.
Despite the seemingly worrying figures for streaming video uptake, in addition to turmoil in the on-line advertising market, Ruane said he expects the company to be profitable by mid 2003. "A 24-hour television news channel is a proven concept. Television works, always has, always will," says Ruane. "I truly believe that this time next year any site worth its salt will have streaming media," he told ElectricNews.Net
Ruane also explained that Anner Media Group, which owns ILTN, will provide streaming video services to other companies looking to launch their content on-line.
A recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers partially validates Ruane's beliefs. PwC says that spending on Internet advertising will increase from USD40 billion in 2000 to USD90 billion in 2005, a compound growth rate of 17.5 percent. That report said that streaming media will revitalise the Internet advertising market and on-line retailers will integrate their activities with catalogues as well as brick and mortar outlets to incorporate the benefits of traditional retailing.
Ireland Live Television News can be found at http://www.irelandlivetelevision.tv.
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