IN
Whether you see William Craig, the man behind iCraveTV.com Inc. as a brilliant innovator or a signal thief, there's little question that he's shaking up the established order in the world of broadcasting.
A veteran of the industry, the 50-year-old Toronto native who is president, chief executive officer and founder of iCraveTV is at the centre of a storm as the show business establishment takes on his fledgling Web site, which allows surfers on the Internet to watch programs. Although the images are fuzzy and small, broadcasters are up in arms because they are not receiving payment for the signals and have launched massive lawsuits to challenge his actions.
Broadcasters and producers have dubbed his venture iStealTV.com, claiming he is like a pirate because he is pulling in television signals and giving them away without permission.
In early December, iCraveTV was the first company in the world to launch such a service. On its first day, the site attracted 360,000 hits an hour, or 8.6 million during its first 24 hours in cyberspace. (Hits, however, don't equate to individual visits by Internet surfers.)
By logging on iCraveTV.com surfers can tune in to any of the 17 channels on the menu.
Mr. Craig has little sympathy for rival broadcasters who claim his actions violate copyright and trademark laws. He sees himself as a legal distributer of the signals.
Executives such as Michael MacMillan of Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc. sell the rights to programs like Traders and Power Play to networks such as Global Television and CTV.
"These guys are used to an environment where a new idea shows up on the regulatory scope at least two to three years out," Mr. Craig says. "Then they have a long time to deal with it and adapt. In our situation, we were on the air in 24 hours," Mr. Craig said. "That is the new world."
His roots run deep in expanding the world of television. When he was a teenager in the 1960s, he landed a part-time job with Canadian Broadcasting Corp. After two years at Carleton University, he left when he was offered a job with Rogers Communications Inc. and later worked at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. In the 1970s, Mr. Craig was the first program director of Rogers Community Channel 10 in Toronto, which was know as Citizen TV.
"Citizen TV was one of the great promises of the cable industry. The idea was that because there would be all these channels available, there would be all sorts of room for people to have direct access to TV," Mr. Craig told The Globe and Mail in an recent interview. "But the reality was someone still controlled how many channels there were."
The Internet changes all that, because the number of channels is infinite.
"The Internet is a very personal experience -- the P in PC stands for personal. When you sit down at a computer, it is just you and the Internet. When you sit down at the family television, it is a shared experience."
During his time working at Rogers, he went to Minneapolis as vice-president in charge of franchising to acquire seven cable franchises. He negotiated six of them.
Later, he moved on to several U.S. cable operations including General Electric Cablevision, the SportsChannel in Cleveland, Ohio and KBL Sports Network in Pittsburgh where he poured his energy into keeping the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball franchise in the city. At that time his secretary described his tenacity. "He won't quit until he get what he wants," she said. "He's that way in anything."
Mr. Craig lived in Pittsburgh for the past 10 years until the middle of last year and until October of 1997 was vice-president and general manager of Fox Sports Net Pittsburgh, a regional network.
From there he went to the Pittsburgh Penguins as director of development. Court documents filed yesterday in the United States by major broadcasters claim he devised a scheme to terminate a long-term rights agreement with his former employer, a plan that was later overturned.
The idea for the iCraveTV was born in the early 1990s, when Mr. Craig was in Pittsburgh for Tele-Communications Inc., where Mark Cuban, now a vice-president of Yahoo Inc. developed an Internet site called ( http://www.broadcast.com ). That innovation came about when Mr. Cuban and a pal combined a PC and a high-speed phone line in a bedroom of Mr. Cuban's home to follow the play-by-play of a Hoosiers college basketball game.
Now that method is used by 488 radio and 65 television stations and cable networks to reach millions of Internet users, after Yahoo bought Broadcast.com in July for $5-billion (U.S.).
The difference is Broadcast.com negotiates rights in advance to broadcast content. Ottawa has said it will not pass new regulations for the Internet for now, but in the United States, Webcasters negotiate licensing fees with the recording industry, or face arbitration.
When he launched his Web site, Mr. Craig surprised the recording industry, and has paid nothing in royalties, nor has he arranged for broadcast rights for the Internet.
"The only way to get into the game is to be first to the market with a good idea and then maintain your position," Mr. Craig said recently. "Amazon.com is a great example.
"You don't just slam on the brakes on technological development because it doesn't fit the old norms. We are trying to be as responsible as we can while being entrepreneurial. The Canadian [broadcast]act is beautifully written so it can accommodate change. We are saying to broadcasters we want to pay what is fair."
He sees compensation as a housekeeping issue, while the point of the game is getting TV on the Internet.
For him, iCraveTV "is Canada's platform to the world."