Pay per view

Q: What obstacles did you encounter in the creation of MoboVivo? And what existing technology needed to be in place in order for your platform to be successful? In short, why didn't someone think of this sooner?

A: We've been licensing content since 2005, and then in 2006, with our first version of the web store, we released two TV shows. So we didn't launch with a thousand TV shows or even 100; and neither did Apple. When Apple launched in 2005, they launched with two TV shows as well, so the availability of content and the amount of content has been an illusion, if you think of three years as an evolution versus a revolution in content availability.

I remember my grandmother gave me this mini TV in maybe 1980: black and white, four-inch screen. And it had a handle on it, so it must have been portable, even though it was heavy and much bigger than an iPod. I was the only junior high kid that had a TV with a handle on it.

[But] the technology had to come around where we had small screens and enough bandwidth, actually in people's hands. The iPod is pretty ubiquitous — it's changed a lot of things. It's like the Walkman that everyone had in the '80s. And like that TV that I had.

Q: What is your business model?

A: Our business model is paid downloads. We sell to people that want to avoid ads, don't want to wait for it to come on TV, or missed it last night when it was on. They want to block-view it, they want to download the whole season and watch it end to end on the next plane trip, or at the swimming pool.

Q: How is that sustainable? People can stream shows from network websites for free and can purchase entire series seasons of TV shows at a store and use software to convert it to their iPods.

A: The sustainability of business models is constantly in question. I think the least sustainable business model is web streaming, because it's free to the consumer, but comes at a great expense to the content publisher. CTV, ABC, YouTube, Hulu, CBC — their bandwidth bills would be tens of millions of dollars each, and collectively, we're probably talking a billion dollars. In fact, financial analysis shows that every time someone clicks on a free stream, it costs the content publisher $1.50.

Every time somebody clicks to download a show [on our site], we share revenues with the creative community and the producers. With streaming, there's no sharing with the creative community. And [streaming] is mostly bandwidth costs, and advertisers aren't on board with these models. And consumer habits are in a place where people want to avoid ads.

Q: What have you learned about people's viewing habits?

A: When we launched, we knew nothing about people's viewing habits. We took a hunch and we were following industry leaders like Apple. But since then, we've learned a lot. We've learned that the most popular activity on the internet, in terms of growth, isn't watching TV on websites — it's downloading TV. That's growing at a pace more than any other activity tracked by the Pew research in the U.S.

Surveys are showing that more people would prefer to pay for content than to get it for free. And there's a couple reasons for that: ad avoidance is one, convenience is another and portability is a third.

Q: You've created a way for TV shows to follow us around. What has this done to traditional TV broadcasting?

A: As consumers get used to watching TV on their terms, what we call broadcasting today — like scheduled broadcasting — will change a lot, maybe over the next 10 years. I'm not saying it's going to change overnight. But the next few years, they're going to have to fight to stay alive.

Why would anyone wait for a program schedule, and for people to tell you to watch something? I just don't think it will make any sense. It will be quaint, that period when programmers told us what to watch and when.

Q: Is the future of TV going to be an all-online format?

A: Is the future of TV on the internet? Some infrastructure that delivers things on demand through broadcasting models, news and things people want to watch live — sporting events — broadcasting works for that. But it will be delivered through new networks, things that we call the internet. But not always through what we call a web browser — it'll be on phones, in special apps, in network PVRs.

The future is fragmented. It's personalized. It's on-demand. And I think live broadcasting is what we'll look back on 100 years from now and think, Oh, that's what broadcasting was: it was live!

Q: You were recently awarded a $50,000 research and development voucher from the Alberta government's Innovation Voucher Pilot Program. What are you researching and developing?

A: We're going to release our web store, target more platforms. We believe increasingly that there are second-class citizens in households — for example, if the wife has an iPhone and the husband has a BlackBerry. You can buy a TV show from iTunes, but it won't work with the BlackBerry. We believe that we're going to hit more platforms with more ease for our customers. License more content and reach more costumers. We're going to launch a new product in September.

Q: Can you give me a hint?

A: The product is going to allow us to hit more screens in households, from set-top to cell phone. And we won't be exclusive to any one platform, like Apple or BlackBerry. We'll make it really easy for users to drag and drop their content.

Consumers are sick of buying the same Queen album five times — they've bought in on vinyl, cassette tape, CD and now digitally. They've bought format, not content. We believe that when we sell somebody content, it's not just for one platform.