Circa Pict. & Prod. Co. Intnl Inc. (fka CPPD)

[emit]

CenterSpan inks C-Star deal with new network

Aliza Earnshaw Business Journal Staff Writer CenterSpan Communications Corp. (Nasdaq: CSCC), the Hillsboro company that has developed a peer-to-peer technology platform for delivering digital files securely over the internet, announced a deal this week with a small company that wants to use CenterSpan's technology to deliver a wide variety of entertainment to homes.

MeTVNetworks Inc., a 10-employee company headquartered in Los Angeles, Calif., will use CenterSpan's C-StarOne Network to deliver movies, niche television programming and music to homes that have broadband access. MeTV will pay CenterSpan on a per-terabyte-delivered basis--that is, on data volume. CenterSpan said it expects to see "material" revenue from the deal in the fourth quarter of this year.

This is the second deal that CenterSpan has recently announced with a content distribution company. CenterSpan said last month that VUNet USA, a group of internet companies owned by Vivendi Universal, had signed a letter of intent to use C-StarOne technology to launch an online entertainment service later this year. CenterSpan expects that deal to begin yielding revenue after the launch, which is anticipated to take place in the fourth quarter, but "that could slip," said Kay Richards, a spokeswoman for CenterSpan.

MeTV, founded in 1999, sells monthly subscriptions to a movie and music service at $9.99 per month, and a subscription that in-cludes television programming for $19.99 per month--though at the moment, subscriptions are free, as part of a temporary promotion. Subscribers to MeTV can either view the network's content on their computers, or, if they want to, cable the computer to a television and watch on the larger set. MeTV also sells hardware for $49.95, or $3.99 per month, that allows the computer to send programming wirelessly to a television, if the two machines are in separate rooms.

MeTV specializes in niche television programming: The Triangle Network, a channel that focuses on content for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered viewers; The Children's Network, which currently distributes solely through MeTV; FightTV, which offers viewing of "ultimate fighting"; religious programming; specific niche-interest sports, such as horse racing, skateboarding and BMX biking; and "in-language" programming, or television offerings in different languages, including, at present, Arabic, Chinese and Turkish. MeTV also carries E! Entertainment Television, style network, Court TV, Game Show Network, music from DMX Music and about 3,500 movies. Other channels soon to be available include MSNBC and Shop NBC. At present, the company offers more than 220 channels.

MeTV Networks Inc. currently uses a Microsoft platform for delivering media files to its subscribers, employing a proprietary client-server technology. The mediated peer-to-peer technology underlying C-StarOne will result in better quality of service to subscribers as well as a cost savings to MeTV, said Michael Dutcher, senior vice president of MeTV.

In tests of the CStarOne system, MeTV found that delivery of content was "visually better," said Dutcher. The continuous streaming of video content was uninterrupted, either at random, or when using the fast-forward, rewind and "pointing" functions on the Windows Media player that controls the play of movies and other streamed entertainment available on the MeTV network.

"Pointing" refers to the ability to select a given place in a movie--say, a scene that starts three minutes, 13 seconds into the movie--and start playing from that point.

MeTV presently has 45,000 users, according to CenterSpan, though Dutcher speaks of the company's "more than 100,000 addressable set-top boxes worldwide."

http://portland.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2002/07/01/story7.html

`Add this - From Microsoft's site.'

The Next Generation of Television
MeTV is a media distribution company that is using technology to re-define worldwide entertainment distribution and significantly lower distribution costs. MeTV combines Windows Media technologies and broadband networks (in place of satellite or open air broadcasting) to deliver live television broadcasts and pay-per-view movies to consumers on their televisions.

To understand where MeTV is heading, it’s instructive to look back at how television has evolved. Greg Bell, President of MeTV, explains, "If you go back to the way television entertainment began, each city used to have a broadcasting tower, and then cable came along and one head-end would service an entire city with substantially more programming, then satellite TV came along and showed that one satellite can service a country with even more programming. Now with Microsoft technologies, we’re able to take one head-end and service the world. So it is a natural evolution and there are a couple reasons why it works: one is the capability of using IP protocols to deliver content, and the other is that the pipes that deliver broadband to the world are already built."

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/content_provider/profiles/metv/default.asp

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