BNTV offers short film format material; a series of three to four minute pieces, on books and authors and broadcast over the Internet, combining streaming video and text with ecommerce. Barnes & Noble commissioned the work of New York-based film, TV and broadband production company, Rain to develop and launch BNTV. The first phase of BNTV, which rolled out on bn.com on June 27, is the bookVideo.

Dominic Schmitt, vice-president of product development at Barnes & Noble.com, is responsible for business development as well as the integration of content into the site. He commissioned Softcom, a video application service provider to implement BNTV's streaming media application.

"We believe that this content that we're creating - and it is original content - is something of a great deal of value for us to push out to the edge so to speak beyond the world of Barnes & Noble.com," says Schmitt. "It is unique. It is moving image, it is streaming media, it is a media element that we can brand and that we can share with some of our biggest partners. It will certainly drive an audience, we believe, and that's one of the reasons we're making this investment."

Adds Schmitt: "We're creating a platform for our brand."

Rain's founder and executive producer, Ilene Saul credits the idea for the bookVideo to the late Tibor Kalman of design company M&Co. Saul hired creative people from different disciplines, including from the commercial world, to help produce the bookVideos series.

"What we were hoping to do is create the sexiness and trailer-like quality of music videos and film trailers and translate that into the world of books," explains Saul.

The process behind the making of the bookVideos involved matching a director with the appropriate book. Saul explains that it was the job of Stu Cohn, the bookVideo commissioner, "to go and meet with all the directors he could possibly think of, review their reels, see what they're interested in, and then match the right book to the right director."

Pellington/Gorai's Mark Pellington directed the bookVideo Of Time And Memory: A Mother's Story by Don J. Snyder, which was broadcast in July. This was an obvious match considering the director's documentary dealing with similar subject matter; Father's Daze chronicled his dad's struggle with Alzheimer's disease. Other directors from the spot world who have helmed bookVideos for BNTV are Mark Neale from LA-based Radar Entertainment and commercial and music video director Grant Gee of London's Hammer & Tongs. A new bookVideo will launch every week, a total of 11 over the course of the summer.

TBWA/Chiat/Day New York worked with Rain on the design of the BNTV logo. New York-based music shops Sacred Noise and Tomandandy provide some of the music.

Rain produced the pilot television show for TheStreet.com and has worked on the development of an episodic series with USA affiliate WHAMI. Saul and her company Rain postponed many projects last year to focus entirely on the launch of BNTV.

WEB.FILES

Rain> www.rain33.com

Barnes & Noble.com> www.bn.com