Beam us up, Scotty: Thunder Bay firm brings Silicon Valley north.

Scott Dougall is out to change the way we watch video. The founder and brains behind a Thunder Bay startup is standing on the threshold of the burgeoning world IPTV (Internet Protocol television) market.

What began as Varuna Software, a small digital and data broadcast company spawned at the Northwestern Ontario Technology Centre, has evolved into SkyStream Networks Canada, whose Sunnyvale, California parent company is a world leader in IP video delivery.

Situated on Balmoral Street in Thunder Bay, Dougall is general manager of SkyStream's 18-employee Canadian division and is director of its software products.

His rapidly expanding company was SkyStream in 1999, but Dougall has resisted the call of Silicon Valley and still resides in Thunder Bay.

"I'm certainly missing out on opportunities by not being down there but there's a good quality of life here," says Dougall, who spends one week out of every month in California.

The Thunder Bay company manufactures a patented software package that Dougall developed from scratch years before, called zBand, a content delivery platform. The package allows service providers to deliver high-quality digital media files such as streaming video and audio.

"We basically manage the pushing around of large digital files and streams" allowing broadcast networks such as telecos, satellite, cable networks, TV stations or any distribution network that manages the distribution and delivery of digital assets.

Dougall's entry into the video software market stems from his years growing up in the studios of his father--and local media baron--Fraser Dougall's, TV station, CKPR in Thunder Bay.

Those experiences led him to start dabbling in data broadcast and led to networking and partnering opportunities with large companies toward developing the product in the early 1990s. He founded Varuna in 1996, developing digital and broadcast management technology.

Soon he was collaborating with SkyStream to integrate digital data with industry-standard broadcast systems, and Varuna launched software to manage, collect and broadcast digital information directly to computer users.

"A broadcast signal is really not that much different than an Internet connection, it is just what you send over it that is different. I thought why not start sending Internet content over broadcast signals and broadcast content over Internet signals?

"That's really the founding pattern there; it's really effectively what we do."

Digital cinema delivery and the consumer movie market, including Disney's MovieBeam service, are the biggest customers of SkyStream's zBand software.

Instead of paying a courier to ship big spools of celluloid to 25,000 North American theatres, the software delivers the digital files by satellite.

The Russian Satellite Federation uses zBand to deliver Pravda globally and Investors Business Daily newspaper uses the software to transmit files to their regional printing plants around the world.

Other interesting customers include Korea Telecom and China's Ministry of Water and Resources, which uses the software to deliver maps and flood plan data.

These days Dougall is bestowing the virtues of Push Video on Demand and how it will transform the IPTV market.

The technology allows telecos to roll out high definition video, including popular movies, and push them out to viewers' homes.

"We take videos and deliver them to an embedded device so people can actually rent them and watch them on the device itself on your set-top box on your TV or cell phone or PDA."

Disney's MovieBeam is offering it to their customers.

"In the next few years, you'll see more of that evolving. We're working with a number of players in the market now to embed our technology into their devices."

Stay tuned, he says, for details on new devices and networks from SkyStream later this year.

www.skystream.com

www.notc.ca

BY IAN ROSS

Northern Ontario Business