Newmarket’s DTV launches a new in-hospital TV network 
Lots of people nervously page through Highlights magazines in hospital waiting rooms, or fidget and flip through the oodles of cable TV channels while in their patient rooms, trying to keep their mind off the fact that, well, they’re in a hospital. It’s usually pretty stressful, whether it’s you or someone else who’s sick. Ever try to relax while watching CNN?

Enter Rob Connelly and Michael Wadleigh of Newmarket’s DTV. Together, they’ve created a new digital television network featuring soothing music and equally calming visuals that help make hospital wards a more pleasant environment in which to heal.

Therapeutic music television wasn’t the original plan, though. Connelly and Wadleigh originally envisioned a scenario where they would work with smaller stations as the television world makes the segue way into the inevitable all-digital format.

“My original idea was that TV stations, when they eventually go digital, will multiplex channels,” says Connelly, 40, of DTV’s genesis. Each station, Connelly theorized, would be able to transmit three or even four different channels with the bandwidth they’d be using. “They would have a shortage of programming,” he says, “but digital television took years (to develop) and it’s still not even completely here.”

A year ago, Connelly decided that he and Wadleigh should bring the DTV thing to the forefront again and rethink where they could introduce the concept. The idea of hospitals came up in the brainstorming, since most hospitals already have digital cable in every room. DTV now operates in four N.H. hospitals: Exeter, Portsmouth Regional, St. Joseph’s in Nashua and Catholic Medical Center in Manchester.

“The copper wires that are running to all those rooms have 30 empty channels,” Connelly says, “and these four hospitals reach 700,000 people a year, not counting the visitors. It was a huge audience.”

Currently, each of the four participating hospitals have four channels, each with a different style of music to accompany the many still images that flash and float on the screen. Portsmouth, for instance, offers a classical, a country, a classic rock and a spiritual channel. Each song has a number of computer “tags” that are attached to it—key words relating to the song that tell the computer to pick an appropriate image from its database. If Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” comes up, for instance, the computer will look through its list of dog photos and the like, and so on with songs about mountains, other countries, etc. The tags keep the visuals from being standard “music video” fare, as each time the song plays through, the computer dips into its bag and brings out a different photo as the song plays.

“It’s the same context (each time a song plays) but with different photos. Ideally, in the future patients would have lots of different choices. A patient could write a paragraph and it will grab related things.”

One other key is the use of popular music. Connelly and Wadleigh have an arrangement with some of the music industry’s royalty collectors to treat them as a regular radio station, and they absorb the cost of royalties, money that the hospital would otherwise have to kick down for the service.

The service is free for the hospital. Funding comes from local companies who underwrite the project and advertisers, which are, of course, welcome. Total advertising time amounts to four 30-second commercials each hour.

Wadleigh is no slouch when it comes to music and visuals. He’s the director of a little documentary called “Woodstock” that came out in 1970.

“The whole thing started with Michael Wadleigh,” Connelly says. “He always sends me his digital photos, and then I started mining NASA’s public archives and the national archives. All of a sudden we had this massive database of almost up to a half million photographs that we could make into a whole bunch of different channels.”

Connelly’s father was a longtime DJ at Portsmouth’s AM station, WBBX, which was owned for a time by Red Sox announcing legend Curt Gowdy. Connelly used to “hang with the boys and pull records for them” at the old station, and music has stayed in his blood ever since as he dabbled in just about every aspect of radio and some TV over the years.

The pair are co-founders of WXGR-LP, 101.5 FM, one of the area’s two low-power FM stations, along with Portsmouth Community Radio, WSCA-LP, 106.1 FM.

Public service announcements usually get pushed to non-prime hours on radio and TV, but with DTV, these are part of the network’s bread and butter. They’re working with the N.H. chapter of The American Heart Association, for example, whose advertisements run throughout the day in “prime time.”

So far the reaction has been great, according to the company’s surveys. One nurse said she used DTV to help a patient in labor who forgot her iPod. “I have received comments from hearing impaired patients about the images,” says another nurse, “and from visually impaired patients about the music.” Still more nurses report the soothing effect the music and pictures have on terminally ill patients.

For somebody who has spent his life in and around radio, Connelly couldn’t be happier about DTV.

“Every time when you take a chance, you never know if anyone is listening or watching,” he says, “So it’s very gratifying to have this kind of thing.”

“We’re trying to get more hospitals,” Connelly says. “All somebody needs to do is say they want it and we’ll show up and set it up.”