Health TV Network

Health TV is New Zealand’s largest health & lifestyle television channel reaching an audience of 6.8 million viewers annually. It is installed in over 200 medical centre and hospital waiting rooms nationwide. Health TV www.htv.co.nz is also the largest Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) channel in New Zealand.

Some of the network of several hundred displays were installations that were upgraded to Wallflower to replace an existing software package.

Wallflower was selected as the most cost-effective solution incorporating features that provide unique management and monitoring of displays. The Wallflower deployment includes the Symantec Altiris network management package that ensures accurate and efficient delivery of media and schedules to displays.

Health TV produce targeted health related content, which can be delivered and customised for each individual display location. Each screen is effectively its own TV channel allowing relevant content to be delivered to the right location.

Health TV’s Project manager, Justin Morris says “the solution provided by Wallflower allowed the flexibility and control we needed to future proof the Health TV channel, which will grow to over 300+ sites receiving very large volumes of data per month, while working within the confines of the NZ network environment. We look forward to working with Wallflower in other markets internationally.”

All displays are permanently connected to a central management point using the newly de-regulated Unbundled Bitstream Access service. Matt Jackson of Kordia says “we believe the concept of using the service as a private network not routed via the Internet is unique to New Zealand”. As a specialist in the Telecommunications and Media sector Kordia www.kordia.co.nz was well placed to provide a solution which suited the exact requirements of Health TV’s business model for security, commercial structure and service levels. “Moving forward we are planning to work closely with Wallflower™ to introduce multicasting technology to improve the distribution of media in this environment.”

In the future the Health TV displays will use the Wallflower Alive!™ Facial Recognition module to provide audience measurement analysis.