Products / Services

Debuts New Video Format and Marketing Toolkit

Sherman Oaks, CA, December 17, 2009 - Living room crooners will be singing praises for VOD and The KARAOKE Channel. Avail-TVN™, the largest independent digital media services company in North America, and Stingray Digital, a leader in interactive music services, today announced an upgrade to The KARAOKE Channel’s video format, and a new marketing toolkit to help operators promote the brand.

The new and improved videos will display an original, genre-specific video montage behind the clearly displayed lyrics on the screen. These new videos will more closely resemble music videos and will enhance the karaoke experience for the singer and for those watching.

The KARAOKE Channel On Demand, owned and operated by Stingray Digital, features over 600 songs, with content refreshed monthly from a library of more than 17,000 songs. Analytics show that 54 percent of subscribers with access to The KARAOKE Channel use it at least once a month, that it performs well across all demographics and is a top-performer in the music on demand category. Avail-TVN is the exclusive licensor and distributor of The KARAOKE Channel, which is currently available to more than 34 million households in North America.

“The consumer response to The KARAOKE Channel has been tremendous – consistently generating over 3 million views a month. The new video formats have been a win-win for our affiliates and their subscribers, and further enhances the unique value proposition of VOD,” said Jim Riley, chief revenue officer at Avail-TVN. “As we approach the Christmas season, during which karaoke performs especially well, the new videos will further immerse VOD customers in the music and improve an already-exciting experience.”

To help affiliates market The KARAOKE Channel, Avail-TVN is making available a new awareness campaign, featuring a cross-channel ad that affiliates can run on their systems and/or promote within their customized barker service. The company’s affiliate website also offers a host of additional tools to help market the new offering including The KARAOKE Channel logos, web banners, artwork for bill inserts, articles on karaoke that can be used in customer newsletters and tip sheets for call center agents.

“We are always looking at ways to improve the experience for our users.” said Eric Boyko, President of Stingray Digital. “The music in our videos is already of the highest possible quality, so the obvious next step for us to take our karaoke to the next level, was to upgrade the backgrounds with original videos.”

Avail-TVN is the largest independent digital media services company in North America. Working with every major studio and television network, the company offers a full content line up of MPEG-4 encoded live programming as well as video on demand content in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 to multichannel video providers throughout the US, Canada, the Caribbean and Mexico. The Avail-TVN platform is an open, advanced technology, offering the most comprehensive, end-to-end solution for licensing, managing, distributing and marketing linear and on-demand content to virtually any platform today and is extensible to support the new services of tomorrow. For more information please visit avail-tvn.com.

Stingray Digital is a leader in interactive music distribution. Their properties include The KARAOKE Channel, the world’s largest licensed karaoke library and karaoke service on TV and Internet, Galaxie, the leading digital music service on TV in Canada, Chum Satellite Services, a leader in commercial music and video solutions and its music licensing unit, Stingray Music. Stingray Digital was founded by seasoned new media entrepreneurs, Eric Boyko and Alexandre Taillefer, and is financially backed by Telesystem and Novacap. Headquartered in Montreal, Stingray Digital has more than 110 employees and additional offices in Charlotte, Los Angeles and Budapest. For more information, visit www.stingraydigital.com.