HALIFAX – The content offerings are pretty light at the moment (thanks mostly to some sticky negotiations with broadcasters), but EastLink, the country’s seventh-largest subscription TV company, officially launched EastLink-To-Go Tuesday morning.
The subscriber-authenticated, TV Everywhere service is the first in North American powered end-to-end by Cisco’s Videoscape technology and will allow EastLink subscribers to take their TV with them wherever they are in Canada, on whatever device they like at no additional cost. The Videoscape platform makes the content fit on any screen “through an intuitive technology that adapts the format of the content for optimum quality and a superior viewing experience,” reads the press release.
Also available through the service is some of EastLink’s 10,000-plus title video on demand library and EastLink’s very popular local sports broadcasts on cable community channel EastLink TV. In fact, said company president and CEO Lee Bragg in a press conference this morning, content from Corus Entertainment brands Treehouse, OWN, and YTV will soon be added, along with Stingray Digital’s Galaxie Music channels. The company knows it needs more content and plans to aggressively pursue more, Bragg added.
The deployed Videoscape solutions include Cisco Videoscape Distribution Suite, Cisco Videoscape Media Suite, Cisco Media Processor and Transcode Manager, and Cisco Videoscape Soft Clients. “Together, these components provide a pre-integrated, pre-tested ‘TV Everywhere’ solution that can be deployed right away and can be used as a platform to roll out new services in the future,” says Cisco.
EastLink also launched an EastLink To Go Android app with an iOS version coming to the Apple App Store in the coming days.
As for the limited content being made available at launch, “Every day we continue to negotiate with our content providers to try to get access,” said Bragg during the interactive press conference hosted at Cisco’s Toronto headquarters (where he’s pictured at the Halifax Cisco Telepresence base in Halifax with EastLink’s Dan MacDonald, left, and Jill Laing). “As you know, some are easier to negotiate with than others on availability of content but our goal is to get as much as we can.”
When asked by Cartt.ca if it’s just a money hang-up for these rights, Bragg added: “I think most of it’s just that they want additional fees, and some have not decided whether or not they want to share the content in this manner with anybody else.”
– Greg O’Brien
