With Microsoft getting into the Live P2P television game with Livestation, interest has been growing in the space. We covered a number of leading operators earlier this month. On that list was the European focused company Zattoo with a product that is currently only available in a number of European countries, and only then by invite.
The folks at Zattoo were kind enough to offer me a 7-day trial pass to Zattoo and I’ve been playing with in now for 24 hours. My conclusion so far: Zattoo is awesome.
This is how Zattoo describes their offering; every single part of it is accurate:
Before Zattoo, TV on the Internet wasn’t like TV at all. Video streams skipped, stuttered and broke up; image quality was lousy. Zattoo puts real TV on your computer. Our revolutionary technology provides the true TV-quality video delivery and smoothness everyone’s been waiting for.
The trial access I was given was to the Swiss version, so the number of English language channels was limited, yet the total number of channels is strong. There would be at least 30 live channels covering a gauntlet of free-to-air offerings as well as a large number of cable channels including CNN, Al Jazerra, BBC World, Bloomberg, CNBC Europe, France 24 English and MTV.
The client itself is easy to use; channels are listed to the right of the viewing box. The viewing window can be resized as needed or switched to full screen.
Quality is where Zattoo is the stand out offering in the space. It’s not 1080p HD viewing, and at full screen on a 22″ monitor the quality isn’t brilliant, but it was watchable. From a window though the picture quality is clear and easy to watch. Better still, the picture doesn’t stutter nor pixelate; it just simply works. I tried everything to make it break, downloading a large file, Twittering, downloading email and surfing the web all over a 2mb cable internet connection; the picture never once skipped a beat. I don’t know how they’ve done it, but they have, and not even services such as Joost have managed to get this totally right so far.
The service is currently free whilst in beta, with plans to eventually offer a free basic service whilst charging for premium channels. Advertising consists of pre-rolls that appear for no more than a couple of seconds while the channel buffers; there is a delay in each channel appearing but it’s no more noticeable than a similar wait on Joost.
There was only one thing that annoyed me with Zattoo: they only gave me a 7-day trial. If the price were right I’d pay for more. Zattoo is the future of live television on the internet and on what I’ve seen so far I can’t recommend it enough. And yes: they also offer a Mac version.
how can there be no comments on this so deep into techcrunch ? is everyone on their iphones! ?
matthew
there was a problem with the time stamping/ order. As I type this it’s actually a fairly new post, apologies.
“European Company”? From the website:
“Zattoo was founded in US in 2005 by Sugih Jamin, professor for computer science at the University of Michigan, and Beat Knecht, software product marketing professional and former McKinsey consultant in Silicon Valley.”
My fault, the word “focused” must have dropped during proofing, fixed. US company but European focused (so far).
..TV who the hell has tme for that when there’s so much interesting stuff to read on the Internet–like the plethora of Techcrunch postings.
It’s about time! This is something that I’d love to try, but I’m still figuring that i phone out…
TV on my 17″ computer screen? What should I do with my widescreen 42″ HDTV? Need Custom Software Development?
Jesus, how do they keep coming up with these names?!
Smart!
A satisfied customer will be Zattoo’s best friend.
What’s with that screenshot….looks like they’re making soup out of those asians. Must one of those crazy japanese shows
Greg
believe it or not CNN has a story about bathing in Wasabe or something like that when I took the shot
Cuube, LOL, although I’ve seen worse.
Yeah it’s almost time to ban the double-o in new domain names, but zattoo.com could be worse.
Anyway, I’ll have to check it out, sounds good. I do like Joost but it could be smoother for sure.
Zattoo is a Swiss company, based in Zurich. Beat Knecht is Swiss, and worked in the valley.
The way they do it: instead of streaming from a central server, the use P2P technology. I don’t know the details, though.
The reason you only got a 7 day pass is probably a legal one: to be able to stream all the TV content, they are bound to control who watches it. AFAIK, use is restricted to some European countries. As a Swiss, I got an unlimited beta.
Guido
I’m not sure who to believe on the company side, so I’m leaving it as “European focused”
I am aware of the legal reasons, it doesn’t make it suck any less though
Zattoo is based in Zurich, we did an interview with Beat Knecht. He’s just travelling around a lot.
Here’s the link to the Swiss “Handelsregister” (an official register, with every Swiss company required to be listed):
http://www.hraz...mp;shab=0000000
Wow… this looks like ACTUAL television on the Internet with REAL channels. It seems like most IPTV start-ups promise an experience like this, then disappoint. I might have to give this a go…
Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
The problem with Zattoo is, that it is actual television over the internet. No on-demand, no comments, no recommender system, no nothing, no community, no exchange. Zattoo is Web 1.0 par excellence. With Zattoo you can replace your TV if you are watching TV rarely anyway. Quality isn’t great, but OK. It is good enough to watch Al-Jazeera news once a week. And if that is about your total TV consumption you will be happy to get rid of the huge box called TV, the extra cables, etc. But if you want TV for the future, Zattoo does not offer anything which might go in that direction – Yet (?).
The problem with Zatoo is that it only allows to watch local channels. In my case, I live in Spain, I installed Zatoo and I was able to watch the same channels I get through the aerial (with dvb).
)
What’s the point of watching the same channels on your computer and on your tv? (unless you’re at work
In Germany, the service was announced for July. But if you follow the discussion groups, then you find a lot of doubts that zattoo is going to start at all here. There seem to be a lot of legal aspects which apparently are hard to solve. Zattoo doesn’t respond to these concerns. I really hope that they are gonna make it. But I am not that sure anymore.
What is the best [available] open to all online TV service that includes the most international stations? Preferably free.
Moritz
it’s delivered P2P so it’s not Web 1.0 by any shot, as for the on-demand aspect, as much as there is a place of the likes of Joost, there is also a place for passive viewing as well; for example sometimes it’s great to just sit back a watch stuff without having to think about it.
Spiel
Check out our previous post. Unless you speak Mandarin you’re not going to get much value from other services, Zattoo is as good as it gets for live TV, for on demand try Joost.
Duncan
Yes obviously from the technology aspect you are right. I wasn’t trying to criticise that you cover them. I only wanted to point out, that they do not really offer any extra value for anyone who has a TV at home anyway. I just believe that they do not really belong into the same league as Joost. I have seen this Matrix once somewhere with two axis: participatory vs. broadcasting and live vs. on demand.
some examples:
participatory and on demand: youtube
participatory and live: ustream
broadcasting and on demand: joost
broadcasting and live: zattoo
I think it looked something like that. But it’s a while ago. Might have been slightly different. This just points out that Zattoo is doing something which has been developed for a long time. It is called television. They only thing they change is the technique of broadcasting. A service like Joost on the other hand is trying to develop something completely new and different. You may call it TV of the future, Read-write-TV or TV 2.0 or whatever you prefer. It is not sure yet how this type of new TV will look like and Joost is one experiment going on. They might fail, but I am sure one or another type of New-TV will survive in the end.
If there is still space for traditional broadcasting after the New-TV has finally found its perfect shape remains to be seen.
PS one criticism I have about Zattoo is that it does not offer a good Zapping experience. With that it lacks the most important appeal of “sit[ting] back a watch[ing] stuff without having to think about it.”
yeah domains must really be running out
It’s no surprise that this thing isn’t available in the US yet. It may never be, unless they’re bought out by one of the major TV networks (CNN, are you listening?)
Whenever a potentially disruptive innovation of this scope appears, one that impinges on a major, entrenched industry, it is slow to see the light of day in the US, because of legalities and lobbyists. Generally, as with telecom innovations, someone big has to be paid off, or there must be some way for some huge, powerful industry to profit — otherwise, it’s a non-starter in the US.
It doesn’t surprise me that Zattoo has become available first in Switzerland, which is truly “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. America is the land “of, by, and for the industry lobbyists.”
To answer Moritz — true, Zattoo is not doing anything innovative with content. But THAT’S NOT THE POINT. What they’ve created is an utterly seamless, efficient, ultra high-quality way of delivering existing content, that didn’t exist before. That alone is a quantum development.
Because the medium of “television” isn’t going away any time soon, and will not be replaced by things like Joost, this is significant. Previously, there was no smooth, easy, and glitch-free way of watching TV via the internet. Now, apparently, there is.
This will be very big, initially, in countries like Switzerland that don’t have armies of lobbyists defending entrenched special interest groups like broadcast TV stations, syndicators, etc. I think it’s too early to tell whether major American broadcast and cable networks will warm to this. Apparently they have already signed CNN and Bloomberg on. But actually allowing customers in the US to use Zattoo is another story — it’ll have to be vetted by lobbyists, lawyers, and the FCC.
That’s one of the drawbacks of living in this massive, lumbering, bureaucratic empire we call the US.
One of the developers of Zattoo is a professor at the University of Michigan. I had him last semester and he was always plugging the service. The only way to get Zattoo working in the United States is to be on the University of Michigan campus, with a University of Michigan sign-on with a University of Michigan version of Zattoo on a University network.
We can get Comedy Central, HBO and a variety of others for free, but now that I have left the dorms, it is useless (except for watching T.V. during boring classes.)
As a Francophone living in the US, I’d love to have access to the French broadcast stations listed on Zattoo. I’m certain many others around the world would like to have easy free (or cheap) access to stations outside their country. Think of the cross-cultural understanding that could happen.
Of course this may be bad as it would feed my football (soccer) addiction…
Lots of companies can deliver the same viewer experience that Zattoo offers. I’m just guessing as I’m in NYC. I know it’s possible because we test stream local TV stations using P2P. (I’m looking at a NYC news channel right now as we clean up from the steam bomb last night.)
Video quality for P2P is largely a function of average system upload capacity. If the average upload is 300Kbps you cannot economically deliver higher quality bitrate than about 270Kbps. You can make promises for SD quality but they break down when you start talking about 100s of thousands of simultaneous viewers. Bandwidth is a killer when you try to reach commercial broadcast-sized audiences with multicast or hybrid P2P.
It would be easy to net broadcast every station in every DMA to every broadband computer if the actual ownership of the content wasn’t chopped up into a thousand different pieces. When you watch Plain Old TV you are getting content from your local station, the network, syndicators, advertisers, unions, etc. Zatto is playing it safe by only showing a few channels in a few countries. If they went global they’d get shutdown….Veoh and Google on the other hand have enough money to pay for lawyers to do pretty much what they need to do. Only companies with deep pockets will break the logjam that keeps Zattoo off your US PC.
JonP, as long as there are entrenched business interests in the US who feel they’ll lose out by having Zattoo available here, it’ll be slow in coming. Some of these interests include the cable and satellite companies (like Cox and Direct TV), as well as any other industry that thinks it will be hurt, either in real or imagined ways.
“Cross-cultural understanding”?? Do you really think concepts like this enter the minds of people who only care about the bottom line? C’mon, this isn’t France. This is America!!
Hey guys? Who loses with this deal? For sure not the channels.
The ads are still in. It is just normal television. The TV channels just get an extra distribution channel for their stuff (and for their ads) for free.
The most interesting thing (that is watching certain channels from another country) will be obstructed by license rights.
And guys, please don’t get me wrong. I do like Zattoo. I have it installed on my machine and use it regularly. That is approximately once a week. However I do stay firm on my statement, that I cannot see any quantum leap. Possibly broadcasting gets a bit cheaper this way. But that’s about it.
Moritz, you’re right that it’s an extra distribution channel for TV ads, but cable companies will either try to block this or find some way of muscling in on the technology to scoop up some of the profits. If Zattoo doesn’t cooperate with the US cable and satellite companies, it’s dead on arrival in the US.
P2P as an underlying technology hardly makes a company web 2.0
Napster was one of the first P2P services and it predated the advent of web 2.0 by several years.
“Zattoo was founded in US in 2005 by Sugih Jamin, professor for computer science at the University of Michigan, and Beat Knecht, software product marketing professional and former McKinsey consultant in Silicon Valley.”
I remember seeing a very impressive secret full screen breakthru compression live streaming full motion demo [at a mere 270k] — a few blocks from the NSA in D.C. area wherein agents in black suits took down my license plate number — back in late 2000, wherein demo was said being transmitted from U. Michigan, as I was meeting with its AMERICAN inventor [he's now retired in Florida]. Perhaps nothing new under the sun . . . hum.
web 0.0 (yawn)
34 comments and no one has pointed out that the post leads with the misconception that Microsoft is the one launching Livestation?
Why would one want live television when one can have on-demand?