By PETER HADEKEL, The Gazette, Montréal, Canada

Montreal, Canada, November 7, 2008—Convergence has been a long-cherished dream in the media business. It's about bringing together different technologies - print, broadcasting, the Internet and wireless - to deliver content and advertising to audiences. Convergence was the inspiration for Montreal based BCE Inc.'s acquisition of such media properties as the Globe and Mail and CTV. It was also behind AOL's blockbuster takeover of Time Warner in the U.S.

But making the dream a reality has been tough and many convergence-inspired deals have failed to pay off in profits. Now, the story may be changing, says Yves Eric Laliberté, a Montreal entrepreneur who's on the front lines of the convergence phenomenon.

Laliberté is chief executive of StreamTheWorld, a Montreal startup with 60 employees and $7million in revenue this year. It provides audio and video web-streaming to media companies and it's seeing "explosive" demand, he says. The media industry is learning how to sell ads on the Web, while advertisers are now seeing the benefits of an online presence, he says. StreamThe World's customers include about 1,000 radio stations that stream their programs live on the Internet. The young company already claims to have about 60 per cent of the North American radio market.

The company also serves newspaper publishers such as Montreal's La Presse and Chicago's Tribune Co. More newspaper websites are putting up video clips to supplement their news coverage and draw both readers and advertisers, he notes. "They all have the same challenges," Laliberté says. "They're losing advertising money to the Internet. If they want to catch up, they have to leverage their traditional business to the Internet." And that means keeping an audience all day long - in the car, at work and at home - with different delivery platforms.

"Convergence is happening now. This is the first year that I see some of our customers - those who are the most invested in this - starting to make money. "It's just the beginning. Most of our customers are still not doing much to monetize (their Web presence)." The technology used by StreamTheWorld originally was developed by a small Montreal interactive agency that ran websites for radio stations. At first, it used off-the-shelf products such as Real Player and Windows Media, but many customers complained when the software couldn't go around firewalls or they didn't have the right plug-ins, Laliberté said.

The agency "figured out how to bypass that and came up with the idea to stream in Flash (a popular interactive tool). Flash has 98 per cent of computers, including Macs, and there were no constraints. "If you can see a Web page, you can listen to or watch the stream." The wholly owned technology could be offered to radio stations at a lower price, with more audience reach. Streaming costs, which once seemed prohibitively high, began to look much more attractive.

Laliberté, an Internet entrepreneur, was brought into the business in 2006 with a mandate to spin off the new technology into a separate company and raise venture financing. He started his first business in 1996 in Trois Rivières, where he helped Cogeco Inc. launch its Internet service over cable. "We became their lab for R&D. We were testing the Internet over satellite, the Internet over microwave, telephony over cable." He later founded a voice-over-Internet-protocol firm in Montreal known as CESCOM, which raised $30 million in financing. Another of his ventures, creating interactive content for the Web, was eventually sold to Bell Canada.

Laliberté came to StreamTheWorld in 2006 and has raised about $11 million, including venture capital from Propulsion Ventures and Triton Group.

Over the last couple of years, he has built up a sales and marketing organization to go along with a research and development team that refines and develops new products. The R&D team is producing customizable features that will let radio and TV clients "enhance the user experience," he says. The result is a growing client list of about 200 firms, including high-profile ones like CBS, ESPN, Astral Media, Corus and Sky News. What's changed, he says, is that such companies now have a business model to maximize online revenue.