When I received an email from earthTV.com telling me about their service,  I thought it sounded such an amazing technological feat, that I asked them to do a guest interview for the Europe a la Carte Blog. The company founder Thomas M Hohenacker tells us about the challenges of setting up earthTV.com.

1 What is the aim of your site?

EarthTV.com aims to show the World live in fantastic quality, daily to TV viewers and web users all around the world.

2 What prompted you to start your site?

I always wanted to create a television program that can connect people around the planet on a daily basis and that could easily cross all cultural and language bounderies. I also travelled extensively around the world and thought it a fascinating idea for us all to be able to see – at the same time – in highest quality what’s happening around our planet.

3 What has been the hardest aspect of running the site?

Everything was a challenge in this project and it took many years to implement. We had to create everything from scratch to make this vision
come alive: from motion control camera systems, that could withstand any
temperature and climate conditions and that could be entirely controlled
from a central broadcast center, to the transmission and finally to creating new Live formats for international broadcasters and the earthTV.com website

We have designed and built our own motion control camera systems. They
weigh over 30 kg, are extremely precise and over 100 functions can be
controlled from our broadcast center in Munich, it’s as if the world’s
best camera operators were at each location.

We have a very sophisticated content management and delivery system that
produces live feeds several times per hour from all locations around the
world – with a different camera angle and pan each time. We use over 6
different satellites and over 30 different Telco providers to generate
and deliver the live feeds around the world.

4 What is the funniest thing that has happened to you running the
site?

The funniest: spider having a fight in front of the lens, a seagull falling in love with the camera and looking into the lens each day.

5 Is there anything you would do differently with the benefit of hindsight?

I spent a lot of time explaining the initial vision, to show the world live, in high quality, to potential clients. I thought they would participate early on, but they were all afraid, thinking the vision was just too big. It took me a year or so to realize, that we would just have to do it all ourselves – as our potential clients did not have the imagination to picture the possible.

When they then saw that we had installed the network and what we had
achieved, they agreed that it was the most logical and natural thing to
do.

In TV many want to be Pioneers, but paradoxically they are scared to be
First….

My comments – John sounds like you have been totally dedicated to your vision and it has finally come to fruition.