Stocks for Wi-Fi TV (Pink Sheets: WTVI) were down 12 percent, closing at $0.0029 after a steadily climbing earlier this week after the company released news it would start holding live online sales opportunity Webinars this week, the first of its kind in the business.According to a company press release, Wi-Fi TV founder and Chairman Alex Kanakaris brought a “wave of energy and excitement to the panel on convergence at the iHollywood Forum Mobile Entertainment Summit,” where Kanakaris predicted the end of Digital Rights Management (DRM) software for music and movies, along with a new business model that will “result in the biggest viewership ever while paying the artists and actors more than they have ever been paid, and shifting the balance of power to content control.”
Kanakaris also reportedly criticized movie executives and spoke out on artists’ rights after the show, as well as conferring with Brad Duea, president of Napster, about his vision of Wi-Fi TV’s future.
Wi-Fi TV is slowly making a name for itself on the Internet as a provider of online television-based entertainment, touting itself as the “coming convergence of TV and the Internet.”
“The big thing right now is that we’re selling Wi-Fi television stations for $25,000,” Kanakaris told Market News First. “Any business … can own their own television station 24/7 with their own videos, chatrooms, etc. It’s aimed pretty much at any business or organization that would like to have a television station on the Internet that can be viewed globally.”
While many companies have touted this line before, Wi-Fi TV seems to be making it work; the company has made several sales over the past few days to a number of customers encompassing a broad range of interests, from spiritual stations to real estate information. In fact, Kanakaris says it’s this broad range of content that will appeal to viewers.
“It’s enabling us to have a lot of exclusive television content … that you can’t find anywhere else – I think that’s the big push,” Kanakaris said. “We have music, movies, politics, presidential candidates, and those are just some of the topics.”
In fact, the company currently has 450 different channels of content, more than most cable providers – including global broadcast stations and specialty stations. However, Kanakaris feels Wi-Fi TV can go much farther than that.
“We hope to top 1000 this year,” he said.
So what’s the big draw of Wi-Fi TV – or for any interactive television medium, for that matter? What can viewers get from television online that they can’t get from their normal television set?
“[The big difference is] the fact that [our] television is interactive,” Kanakaris said. “There’s a chatbox, instant messaging, there’re multiple ways of meeting people with similar interest. You can see and hear people in 25 different locations. It’s a live community that’s based around interactive television.”