Knowledge Breakfast Interactive Success

The interactive components of TV ONE's weekly programme focusing on developments and issues of importance to the education sector, the 'Knowledge Breakfast', have been hailed as an outstanding success.

In a groundbreaking initiative, TVNZ, production company e-net and nzoom.com established a programme format that incorporated live broadcasts on TV ONE that were supported on the website knowledge.nzoom.com via text, message boards and video streaming of segments of each week's programme. The knowledge website has received a large amount of traffic making it TV ONE's second largest programme site over the course of the series. To date the site has averaged over 5000 page impressions each week with visitors spending a median of nearly three minutes per visit.

The project also launched the first trial in New Zealand to test the delivery of digital content via Internet Protocol Satellite Multicast. The Knowledge Breakfast programmes, the knowledge website and a selection of related web-sites, CD-ROMs, data bases and videos have been sent every week via satellite multi-cast to 12 schools and educational institutions in locations from as far south as Invercargill to Kawakawa in the north. TVNZ staff travelled to all 12 locations to connect the required satellite dish and to install a multicast card in a computer enabling the sites to receive and store the digital files on the computer's hard drive for later 'on demand' access.

"IP multicast offers a new way to distribute large and data rich files, such as video and websites to any location in the country. The satellite provides a huge bandwidth capacity which bypasses the low speed restrictions and congestion of land based internet connections", said Gresham Bradley, Knowledge Breakfast web and multicast Line Producer. "Schools and tertiary institutions have rapidly growing needs for their teachers and students to be able to efficiently access bigger and bigger web files and to download them fast. We are demonstrating in a practical field-trial that multicast works and the feedback we're getting has been overwhelmingly positive."

"We are extremely pleased with the smooth delivery of the multi-casts and the number of visitors the Knowledge Breakfast website has received," explained Glyn Jones, nzoom.com's Executive Producer. "This has been a very positive experience for us and has proven to be a great example of what can be achieved when television and online services are combined to offer a truly interactive experience."

The Knowledge Breakfast's Executive Producer, Robert Boyd-Bell, said the audience response to both the programme and its interactive components has been overwhelmingly positive. "Our aim was to push the boundaries of the latest developments in interactive technology to see whether we could establish a connection with the community. The results speak for themselves. The Knowledge Breakfast , I hope, has opened a pathway to the future for educational communications in New Zealand."

The final episode of the Knowledge Breakfast screens Saturday July 13 from 6.15-9:00am on TV ONE. Visit the website at knowledge.nzoom.com

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