Local Servers

High-speed video, low-speed communities

Increasing Inuktitut language content across Nunavut communities

7 Communities Connected to Hi-speed Inuit Website
All-Inuktitut TV Channel Broadcast to Home Television
Inuktitut Educational Content Direct to Students and Teachers

Inuit and Aboriginal communities worldwide face loss of language and social breakdown from 21st century Globalization and Climate Change. Foreign language media overload is a major cause of language loss, especially for youth.

Communities can reverse this trend by vastly increasing local language media content. Low-cost video and internet tools revitalize language, protect cultural identity, improve education and create jobs for the future using new digital media technology.

IsumaTV [www.isuma.tv] is an interactive social networking website of Inuit and Aboriginal films launched in January 2008. Hundreds of hours of Inuktitut-language content and over a thousand films in 28 languages now can be seen by anyone anywhere with a good internet connection and a computer, laptop or iPod. Unfortunately, most Inuit communities don‘t have sufficient bandwidth to download IsumaTV’s video content. With 7.5 million hits worldwide in its first fifteen months, IsumaTV films viewed hi-speed in Toronto, Paris, Helsinki and Beijing barely can be seen in Nunavut schools and homes where they are needed most.

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Beyond Broadcast: Launching NITV on Isuma TV

Igloolik Isuma is perhaps the most well-known of indigenous media groups in the world, notably through the global success of their prize winning film Atanarjuat The Fast Runner (2000), the first Inuit feature film, created through their distinctive community based production process. Their most recent film (see clip), Before Tomorrow (2008, Arnait women’s collective), is gathering prizes on its festival run. The group formed in 1990, turning televisual technologies into vehicles for cultural expression of Inuit lives and histories, a counterpoint to the introduction of mainstream satellite-based television into the Canadian Arctic. Headed by director Zacharias Kunuk, Isuma engages Igloolik community members while filmmaker and Isuma partner Norman Cohn leads a support team in Montreal. Frustrated by the difficulty of showing work to other Inuit communities, in 2008, they launched a groundbreaking alternative for indigenous distribution, Isuma TV, a free internet video portal for global indigenous media, available to local audiences and worldwide viewers. On May 29, 2009, Isuma will launch NITV on Isuma TV, a digital distribution project, bringing a hi-speed version of IsumaTV into remote Nunavut communities where the bandwidth is inadequate to even view YouTube. NITV allows films to be re-broadcast through local cable or low-power channels, or downloaded to digital projectors. . .

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IFN 2.0 brings HIGH-SPEED videos to Low-speed communities

Indigenous Film Network on IsumaTV distributes Inuit, Aboriginal, First Nations, Metis and other Native films by internet to digital projectors in remote communities. IsumaTV local servers bring HI-speed films to LO-speed audiences.