WITH Peter Cochrane, formerly the human face of BT technology, on board as non-executive director and investor, Enformatica was never going to be less than interesting. Now the Essex-based group has moved beyond Its origins as a provider of business television to PCs, to offer a video-on-demand service it calls "content on demand".

It claims to be able to deliver news, training videos and other kinds of Information to the desktop "at a price 5m times less than webcasting" according to chairman William Poel

Essentially, Enformatica is offering a solution to the problem of opening windows of broadcast information on PC screens usually devoted to market prices or exchange rates. Its EnfoCast service includes BBC News 24, CNN, and ITN. There are broadband solutions -video streaming over the internet, ADSL -but they can be difficult and expensive.

Enformatica simply rebroadcasts the information to small dishes on its customers' premises from a commercial satellite. A clever routing device filters out channels specifically requested by individual PCs and feeds them on to the company's local area network. For the new content on demand service, the transmitted information

- a training video, or the chairman's statement, for example - is stored locally, ready to be accessed on request. www.enfocast.com