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.

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.

“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!!

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.

Of course this may be bad as it would feed my football (soccer) addiction…

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.)

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com

I am aware of the legal reasons, it doesn’t make it suck any less 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.