Close your eyes and imagine what a broadband streaming media or interactive TV screen interface looks like. Odds are you're seeing a busy screen with text, graphics, interaction and (natch) a video window. Unfortunately, creating a web page that screams "broadband" or "I'm a streaming media bigwig" can often be very hard work and require many hours of effort. Fortunately, an enterprising Canadian company called SofTV.net (http://www.softv.net) is coming to the rescue to help web developers quickly create these interactive, rich-media web interfaces.

With SofTV.net's software (like sofTV.Author and sofTV.LiveShow) users can create compelling, interactive streaming media web sites very easily. "You can build these pages with no Java coding and you don't have to hire an army of Java developers," says Dale Gantous, President and CEO of SofTV.net. She says the company is really empowering companies to create streaming media sites as they see fit.

Last week I met with Gantous and Rich Loen, Vice President of Engineering and Imagination to see demos and to observe the software in action.

The demos (which are available on the web site) were compelling and featured applications like interactive news pages, e-commerce sites, live shopping channels, and training and corporate communications.

Streaming Media Newsletter: So how is SofTV.net different from other video tools?

Dale Gantous: The real key is that we've created a technology infrastructure that makes it really easy to launch streaming media websites and to add e-commerce. That's what has people really excited. We have clients (which we haven't released yet) in the e-tailing sector, in financial services, corporation communications, entertainment (they go crazy when they see this) and portal applications.

Q: So it looks almost like a CNBC or Bloomberg screen.

Rich Loen: While it's showing the page, if any element changes on the server, it will automatically refresh the area without affecting the rest of the page. This allows you to put stock and sports information and save it on your server regularly and all the browsers will automatically refresh that content.

Gantous: Some solutions do this [rich interaction] but within the RealPlayer window. We allow you to get outside the RealPlayer window while still supporting Real. There's none of the branding of the RealPlayer.

Q: Is it important for customers to keep those other brands off their site?

Gantous: For some clients it's very important that they have total control of branding and that's why they don't want any player windows. They want a clean look and the video right on their page. Also, for many of our clients it's very important that they support Windows Media and Real. That's because they want to maximize viewers.

Q: Can you make a movie full screen as well?

Gantous: Yes, even better let's say you're broadcasting a big event like the Super Bowl and people want to watch it full screen--you can shrink it down for commercials. Why is that important? Because you can sell not only video commercials but the ability to put an interactive ad, like a Ford advertisement in the video, plus a link to Ford web site and local dealer specials in the browser section.

Q: Is this tool best for broadband-type content? It really has the look and feel of broadband.

Gantous: Actually it works fine with audio in a narrowband environment. You can put the media player on the page and make it hidden or just have the toolbar show up. And it's really up to the content provider. Do they want to reach just broadband or do they want to start 56K streaming and getting a jump ahead and attracting people now? It's really under the control of the developers.

Loen: Everything we're doing works under 28K, all the commands are embedded in the audio or video files. If you're at 28K and are trying to download a big graphic on the page it can interfere with things. At 100K or 56K it doesn't interfere at all. You can cache it on the page so when they first come on all those things load and the content will appear immediately.

Q: Do you need Java to experience these pages?

Gantous: It's a Java applet running on the page so you don't need anything [else] installed. It's a very small application and doesn't add a lot to the page. It's somewhere between 10K and 20K. If you have Windows Media or RealPlayer, all this stuff works. But some of clients to want to reach clients with older browsers, so those users are sent to another page that supports legacy browsers.

Q: Most of it works with clicking and dragging elements around a page and seems easy to build pages.

Gantous: When we make our sales pitch, it's often to the chief technology officer (CTO) who has to get a site launched really fast or want to get into broadband. When they see this, they say "Wow, this is it?" Even the CEOs and other high level people understand--they get it. I bet you could build a web page now.

Q: Yeah.

Gantous: Even I could.

Q: Do you also provide services?

Gantous: We do full services as well for our clients who want them. We will do the web site implementations and full project management--

Q: Sure, sounds easy, it's only click and dragging. [Laughing]

Gantous: [Conspiratorially] Shhh! [Laughs] No, they're very happy for us to build the pages and manage the process. We've been involved in services for quite some time but we're building more in streaming now. SofTV.net is a spin-off of InGenius Multimedia, which has been doing consulting for the telecom industry for the last ten years or so. Within SofTV.net we are increasing the consulting because they really appreciate it, especially new entrants to the market. They're just so happy about it.

Q: You're not looking to replace other technologies like Flash, then?

Gantous: We're not here to say we're replacing your entire current infrastructure--we're not. You can use other tools alongside this. We basically are using DHTML to build these pages.

Q: Yahoo! recently launched an Internet video channel called FinanceVision that deals with financial news and analysis and it reminds me a lot of what you're doing. But they require a separate download as well as Internet Explorer and Windows Media. It's somewhat bothersome that way.

Gantous: Well, we'd love to have them as a client [Laughs].

Loen: The neat thing about what we do is that we don't care if its Real, Netscape or Windows Media and you don't have to care about that either.

Q: Also, Yahoo! FinanceVision is an application and since I'm browser-focused I forget about that. In fact, I was trying to return to it one day and couldn't find it on Yahoo! since I had to click on a link on my desktop. Anyway, I guess I'm saying they could have used something like this instead of requiring a downloadable application.

Loen: Yeah and it turns people off to have to install something else. These players, like Media Player are coming with Windows 98, Internet Explorer 5, Windows 2000--it's there on the PC already.

Q: These demos reminds me a little of interactive TV.

Gantous: Yeah, a little history: we started working with cable and broadcasting industries in 1996 building television channel automation systems. We had products that built broadcast quality analog channels just like Bloomberg. We got into that business knowing that we wanted to build broadcast management tools for the interactive Internet. We "architected" our product knowing we were going to broadband and e-commerce. In late 1998, when Microsoft really went to war against Real we said the time is here. Now's the time! We knew that demand for cable and DSL was skyrocketing and we knew that everybody was getting interested in this market sector. We ported our tools over to the Internet in January 1999 and showed them to Microsoft and they freaked. "This is fantastic. There are two problems: bandwidth and efficient compelling content creation." And they looked at this and said, "You've solved the content problem."

Q: Might the advertisement component be annoying to some people who dislike advertisements filling their screens?

Gantous: That's up to the content creator. Build a web page that people want to come to. But we make it easy for them to do.

Loen: Having done this for TV and brought it over to the Internet, we've learned a lot. How the processes have to work and what you have to do to make it simple and what they need. When you take all that knowledge and make a product that is very simple from one point of view. It does what you need it do very easily. Yet other people coming into this space from the Internet have to learn all this stuff that broadcasters learned 10 years ago.

Q: Do you plan on taking this creation tool and doing anything else?

Gantous: [Relunctantly] Yes. [Laughs] We plan on making it easier and easier and are converting to an application service provider (ASP) model right now so that a wide range of clients can use our software.

Q: Right now you're just selling software, then?

Gantous: We have been selling licenses and we're converting to an ASP model so they can get in at different price points depending on how early they are in their business plan. We're planning on ASP-ing this in partnership with content distribution companies and are matching our pricing model to theirs so that it's easy for clients to buy. We're not going to make it complicated; we have a very simple pricing model. It's going to be monthly pricing.

Q: What's next, then? You haven't don't have a big profile right now.

Gantous: We'll have a whole bunch of customers launching web sites based on this, so you'll hear about them in the next few months. We'll be signing partnerships with content distribution companies, because they want excellent tools in the hands of their clients so they can build more streaming web sites faster and faster. We've got high levels of interest from all the content distribution companies.