Following recent discussions about the future, or for that matter the sad past, of TV, I’ve just been alerted to another platform for the medium.
Zattoo allows anyone to watch live TV, on PC or Mac, while getting on with other things. Not during work hours though, of course. Unless it’s for research. Wouldn’t dream of it.
Is it really “Brand Utility” when it’s a service company offering a service?
Is it “Brand Utility”, for example, when the AA comes to fix my car?
Cheers for the tip Ben.
Is this legal?! I know of countless illegal services offering live streaming TV (Sopcast, TVants et al…) so how have Zattoo managed to make this legal or rather how have they gotten broadcasters to sign-up? (especially the Beeb)
The problem I can forsee with this venture involves bandwidth – if this platform takes off then they are going to need a lot of very expensive server power (especially if they are unicasting rather than multicasting). I wonder how much (if any) the broadcasters are paying them…
Mat, thanks, you’re right. I need to go and look at our categories a little more carefully.
Matt (oh, this is confusing), according to Zattoo it’s all legal because they clear the rights with everyone necessary, which requires doing so by country, not by channel. Therefore, the service has to be localised to countries rather than broadcast globally. But how that’s guaranteed, I don’t know (maybe they check registrants’ IP locations).
Also, they say, “Zattoo is a peer-to-peer application. This means that the data is not streamed from one central server to all users watching a certain program, but flows from one user to the next, thus also using the computing power of the users’ computers.” That probably means more to you than me. Certainly, the ISPs are not happy with all the bandwidth being gobbled up by free video services.