Convergent technology

I read in your Sunday edition, March 18, page 12, a report by Sri Ramadani titled ANteve begins airing 'Boleh Contest', which wrongly said the program organized by bolehmail.com was the first program in Indonesia to combine television and the Internet, allowing viewers to communicate with participants via email. Perhaps The Jakarta Post, which usually is strong in tracking local developments in technology, did not have an adequate opportunity to do its research carefully before reporting this, and hence I am obliged to provide the Post with some relevant information that will give your readers an accurate and correct perspective on what is really meant by the term "combining multiple media" for providing content, and how the industry is really developing in Indonesia today.

Our company Kemana (www.kemana.com), in association with PT Jaring Data Interaktif, is actually the first company in Indonesia to innovatively use television, Internet and print media for its music program KeNada Workshop bersama Gilang Ramadhan. This is a two-hour program on Quick Channel that interviews famous musicians on techniques for playing music.

Viewers can log on to a chatroom at http://kenadaonline.com/workshop and communicate live with the host and the guest musician while the show is on. In addition to this, Internet users can view the television program on their PCs via streaming video, as well as browse information relevant to the program. This is a true example of combining the Internet and television, and not just sending email to participants, which no doubt is a significant improvement over existing practices but a primitive way of utilizing convergent technologies.

This weekly program was first aired on Dec. 16, 2000, and then every Saturday starting on Feb. 3, 2001, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. The program is ongoing, scheduled for the next six months, featuring over 22 famous musicians and several other bands and artists.

Readers wishing to learn more about media convergent technology can see this program during the week via several reruns on Quick Channel and I-Music Channel, available on Indovision and KabelVision or on their PCs, with, of course, a broadband Internet connection. As proof of the uniqueness of this program format, several leading music industry companies in Indonesia are already supporting this venture.

I hope this information proves useful to your technology savvy readers, who no doubt will be extremely pleased and proud to know that there are Indonesian companies today working very hard to successfully develop cutting-edge convergent programming. I believe that such concepts are still on the drawing boards of even world giants of convergent technology such as AOL Time Warner.

SACHIN GOPALAN

Technical Adviser

PT Jasa Cita

Jakarta