It’s enough to make other cable or satellite subscribers green with envy.
Toronto’s waterfront is a highly wired environment, with new condominiums, businesses and recreational infrastructure connected via fibre optic networks.
Dedicated new fibre optic lines now being dropped into condominiums along Toronto’s waterfront are delivering high-end, low cost TV services and streaming media access.
A basic package of some 50 top TV channels is offered for $40 per month; a la carte channels can be added individually, and premium packages are also offered. The channels are HD; there are streaming media options and plans do call for PVR or on-demand type services as well.
Beanfield Metroconnect, the company that’s delivering high speed Internet services as part of the major Waterfront Toronto redevelopment, community-building, and smart city development project along the city’s harbourfront, has launched its service to condo residents in the area.
The Toronto-based telecom company provides Internet, phone and TV service to downtown condominium residents, among other services.
Beanfield TV is delivered over the company’s private fibre-optic network to set-top boxes it provides.
“We’ve built a simple yet solid, future-friendly TV service to meet the wants of users today as well as tomorrow,” Beanfield CEO Dan Armstrong described. “All of the channels we carry are in HD, unless a particular channel is only available in SD. We never duplicate channels on our channel lineup,” he said of the practice followed by some other providers that drives him – and others – crazy.
What’s really interesting is that Beanfield sources the TV signals itself, and in many cases, the delivery chain is all fibre.
“We source many of our channels directly from the studios where they are broadcast,” Armstrong explained. “We have been selling fibre to many of the broadcasters for years for their networks, so we are already in the studios anyway. It was a trivial exercise for us to light up some additional strands out of the locations to bring the signals into our own TV system.”
Except for some U.S. channels available only via satellite, for which Beanfield has receiving dishes, all of the TV signals on its system arrive and are distributed via fibre, so signal and image quality is at the highest level possible.
Beanfield TV delivers HDTV, along with other services, and the company will offer additional streaming media services via its set-top box.
Beanfield is “fooling around with encoding the TV signals at ridiculously high bitrates”, Armstrong noted, in order to really amp-up the video delivery quality, which is not constrained by bandwidth and can be encoded as high as is desired. “Our primary area of product development will be to focus on this super-high quality video.”
As far as the channel line-up being offered, Armstrong says he had grand plans, many of which could not be completely fulfilled at launch, but the efforts continue.
A la carte offerings, he says, are restricted not by the TV service provider but often by the actual content owner, or program rights holder, but Beanfield is working to expand its a la carte channel selections.
Likewise, it is working to add more multilingual channels to the service: “One place where we are a bit weak is with some of the non-English channels,” Armstrong acknowledges, adding that “Our network has no bandwidth or capacity constraints, so it’s just a matter of being allowed to carry a channel. If we can carry it, we will.”
Beanfield will unveil its PVR service by the end of the year, taking it out of the labs where testing is currently underway; program recording, storage, archiving and subsequent viewings will be supported.
Likewise, the TV system’s Video on Demand and Pay per View options, part of the Beanfield Video Store, will let customers rent movies, buy PPV events, and watch free catch-up episodes of TV shows.
Again rights issues are the hang-up, but Armstrong says he is hammering the content owners for more usage rights.
He’s also in discussion with streaming movie services like U.S. based Netflix, and the new Canadian services, shomi and CraveTV, to address both technical and rights issues in order to add those services to his platform.
He noted that the Canadian music streaming service Stingray will be integrated into the Beanfield TV box and be available early next year.
On-screen guides and program listings, mobile app integration and other features are in the pipeline, but Armstrong is clear that “TV watching is what we’re all about.”
With what he’s offering, that should be plenty.
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Submitted by Lee Rickwood
