Wednesday afternoon brought us to I-blast. We met with Ken Solomon, president, Oliver Luckett, Co-founder and CTO, and Lauren Reiss, VP of business development and a CBS alumna. I-blast is establishing a broadband, digital infrastructure for transmitting content by buying unused bandwidth from television stations. I-blast transmits its content to a satellite that forwards the content to a television station, which, in turn, transmits the signal to homes throughout its region. I-blast does not want to be a content provider, but rather a channel along which content providers can quickly and inexpensively transmit their product.
Potential content includes movies, music, and television programming.
The end user will need a special receiver and can download a variety of content from I-blast s content providers. Finally, we arrived at Paramount studios. After a studio lot tour we met with Isaac Palmer, VP of Corporate Development of Viacom Entertainment, the parent company of Paramount studios. Quite coincidentally he also has the distinction of being a Columbia College alumnus. He tried to give us a sense of how they decide the number of and what kind of films are produced in a year.