Send in your video footage to a website, put in your credit card details and watch your home movie broadcast on national television. That's the plan for Open Access, a digital television station that will provide airtime for anyone willing to pay.
Open Access's website will be aimed at individuals who want to broadcast almost any kind of material, subject to ITC regulations on advertising and sponsorship. The station, which started broadcasting in December, charges £275 for 15 minutes of airtime, but once customers can send in material using a broadband connection and book airtime online, the cost will come down substantially, according to James Jegede, chairman of London-based Definition Consultants, the company that owns Open Access. "We hope people will get Open Access for under a tenner," he says.
Its programs are transmitting from the Eurobird 1 satellite and can be viewed in the UK on channel 687 on Sky's digital service, and throughout northern Europe by anyone with a suitable satellite dish and receiver - a potential audience of about 75m.
Its purpose is to provide access to anyone, however small their potential audience, says Jegede. "We want to give access most of all to those who are not served by commercial TV and to broadcast experimental forms of programming which would not normally be commercially viable on mainstream television." This will include short films by new film makers, animation programs made by children, poetry and even Extreme Knitting - a show devoted to making scarves in dangerous places.
Open Access will also sell airtime to businesses wishing to show material to small but highly targeted groups. It has only been commercially viable to carry out this sort of narrowcasting by making programming available for download or streaming over the internet, or by distributing video cassettes individu ally. Open Access opens the possibility of companies replacing internet-based narrowcasts of product launches or shareholder meetings with televised events, and businesses complementing catalogues with broadcast ones: a property auction house, for example, could televise walkthroughs of properties for sale.
New Deal for Musicians, a government-funded initiative that aims to help unemployed young people find work, is hoping to take advantage of narrowcasting to expose new musicians to agents and record companies by paying for a series called Virtual Venue to be aired on Open Access. "There is no chance of getting young musicians like this on to normal television," says Graeme Robinson, man aging director of Circulation Recordings, the company that produces Virtual Venue. "We can use the show to help people create a demand for their music."
The internet will play a key role in ensuring that people actually watch programs like Virtual Venue screened on Open Access, Jegede believes. "The internet is a great way to get people aware of your broadcast. It's very cheap, simple and effective to send emails out, targeting everyone who might be interested."
That an email-based publicity strategy can be effective has been proven by veteran musician John Otway, who has used Open Access as a vanity broadcaster to screen The Cube, a tongue-in-cheek series of four 15 minute episodes which he produced "to give something back to the music industry and to share the knowledge he has gained from his 25 years as a chart act". Otway promoted the show by posting information about it on his website and emailing everyone subscribed to his mailing list. As a result, says Jegede, an estimated 20,000 Otway fans tuned in to the first episode on May 14.
With broadband internet access becoming commonplace around the world and the price of television access falling to as little as £10, web-based greetings cards may be replaced by television-based ones. Submit a video containing a holiday message to a website, and your friends could receive an email: "You have been sent a TV postcard by a friend: tune to Open Access tonight at 7pm to view it."
