SKG to merge YNN broadcast content with services for education market

SKG Interactive Inc is removing advertising from its recently acquired Youth News Network (YNN), as part of a new business model that should appease critics of the school news service and drive students, parents and teachers to its new educational portal. The Richmond Hill-ON company purchased the youth broadcast service earlier this month when it acquired Montreal-based Athena Educational Partners Inc. The transaction is expected to be worth $2.7 million in an all-stock deal scheduled to close by Nov. 30. Key to SKG’s strategy is the redesign of the ynn.com portal, which will see content from the 12-minute news broadcast supplemented with information on school courses, activities, student records and other educational resources. "We’re dealing with some of the highest-profile web design and creation people. We’re re-branding and re-imaging everything and re-building it from the ground up," says SKG chair and CEO Paul Romanchuk. The new portal is expected to be launched early in the first quarter of next year. SKG also owns NorstarMall.ca, an online shopping site that incorporates both real and virtual stores to create a "real-life" mall experience. Visitors can access the site via their PC or a wireless device. Unlike Athena, SKG has longstanding business ties with the educational community. Its subsidiary, SRB International, supplies budgetary software to about 75 schools that participate in the Educational Computing Network of Ontario. SKG also worked with Trillium Partners to develop the Trillium Student Information Management System, an educational IT system. The company is now adding content to the mix in an effort to become a larger application service provider (ASP) both here and abroad. "Basically, we’ve got two companies (in the educational) arena," says SKG chair and CEO Paul Romanchuk. He notes that SRB develops and manages administrative and financial systems for schools which contain raw data on students, marks, classes, schedules, and other information. For its part, Athena will deliver the broadcasting and web content through equipment installed in the schools. He says the systems will merge online to create a comprehensive school resource for students, teachers and parents. "Once we put these two (systems) together, there is no competition anywhere in North America," he says. "We are going to have a Canadian solution which is second to none and which can be leveraged into the North American community and the global community. It’s going to be a first, we are going to have it off the ground in the first quarter, and there’s nobody in that space." YNN has been in extensive trials with several school boards, since launching its service in February 1999. The service, which broadcasts short clips about current affairs with some advertising into classrooms, has received mixed reviews from such testers as the Peel District School Board in Ontario. A recent report by the Peel board noted that 22 per cent of teachers and 43 per cent of students agreed the service should be dropped. In all, Athena had signed up approximately 26 schools, with 50 expected to be on board by the first quarter of 2000. Under the new business model, Romanchuk says the company will rely on revenue from its content and administrative systems software and support. By dropping the advertising and boosting content on the YNN site SKG hopes to turn its critics into potential customers. Romanchuk says the same model, with much of the technology work perfected in its NorstarMall portal, can be applied to other vertical markets, including health. He disagrees that concentrating on funded sectors such as health and education has much to do with a fast imploding business-to-consumer market, saying SKG has pursued a broader strategy since its beginnings.

SKG to merge YNN broadcast content with services for education market

Broadcast | November 15, 2000

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