Itiva and EMI Music Canada:
A Positive Impact on Streaming Music Videos

EMI Music Canada, the Canadian home of one of the “big” four music distributors, has a plethora of marketing tools available to promote their artists. Yet with 40 music labels and over 1500 artists, there’s always a marketing challenge. The ever-popular music video has since the advent of MTV found an eager audience. But TV audiences are moving quickly to the Internet and EMI needs ways to deliver their artists’ messages with as much clarity and “wow” as the artists bring to the camera.

EMI Music Canada was offering video streaming long before Itiva came along. Jeff Coleman, Director of New Media, notes their six-year-old EMIssion-Online.com newsletter has been streaming music videos since 1999. EMIssion, with a circulation of over 20,000 readers, offers weekly announcements on new releases, with links to the latest audio and video.

The problem was it streamed at only 300 kb per second. In layman’s terms, that’s like watching TV on a small screen with rabbit ears to catch the signal. That wasn’t the quality they needed to display their talented musicians. So in the spring of 2006 EMI Music Canada’s New Media group was introduced to Itiva and testing the beta became the next logical step.

The EMIssion-Online.com implementation required Itiva’s development of a universal Adobe Flash player to view the 500 kb per second video --as Itiva were acknowledged experts at delivering content at significantly higher quality. Itiva’s video Content Distribution Network (vCDN) was put to work using standard Internet protocols, to deliver Web-based video with unrivaled balance in performance and economic efficiency. By taking large media files and slicing them into web objects, video becomes easily trans¬portable throughout the Internet.

"Itiva has easily doubled both our video quality and throughput,” said Mr. Coleman. “Itiva gave us a faster and more engaging way to deliver music videos online. This makes it easy for us to stay on the leading edge, enhance value for our artists and meet consumer demands."

How was the implementation process? "Not just seamless -- effortless and seamless,” said Mr. Coleman. Essentially EMI had two jobs: get the raw video to Itiva; and drop a link on the web page. “Our average raw music video is one gigabyte. We provided over 20 videos to Itiva, simply by mailing them several DVDs. They gave us a URL, which we gave our subscribers. That was the process."

Current Itiva customers are, for the most part, uploading their encoded videos and using a dashboard to control access and distribution. A private fiber connection is also available for publishing large files. Itiva does still offer encoding – whatever makes the process most convenient for the customer and offers the highest quality output.

Coleman couldn’t be more pleased with the quality of the video. “We’re happy with the result.”

The big take-away? “There was never a drawback to using Itiva,” said Mr. Coleman. “We tried it; it worked! It always feels good to deliver a better product without greater cost.”