Skinkers, the UK company that is building a P2P live TV platform with Microsoft, has taken $16 million Series B in a round led by Acacia Capital Partners that included original investors Spark Ventures and the Skinkers Management team.
Skinkers will use the funding to further develop and enhance their Live Notification Platform technology and bring to market LiveStation, their live P2P television platform.
Skinners LiveStation product is built on Microsoft’s Silverlight platform and offers a multi-channel live TV platform that will provide existing TV channels both for free and on a paid basis; think cable TV, but on a computer. Competitors include Zattoo, that already offers an existing P2P live platform that provides limited access within Europe. See our previous Zattoo review here.
The P2P live television market competes directly with on-demand providers such as Joost. See our review of Live P2P TV companies here.
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This is quite interesting news. Skinkers could be a major player in this market and it is a market that is growing at a rapid pace with a lot of revenue possibilities and options for expansion.
There is no doubt : despite the increasing capacity of IP backbones, the emergence of HD movies and videos, added to the increasing demand for more and more “niche audience” multimedia contents will make P2P technologies the best solution to efficiently deliver huge video files to consumers and to promote & sell “long tail multimedia contents,” with very low distribution cost for content producers and then very attractive offers for consumers, mixing VOD, SVOD etc.
Empowering the IP network infrastructure is a first step, then we have to make P2P technologies usable by non-techies. Some companies, like Joost, LiveStation or Babelgum are linking altogether a proprietary P2P client with a video player. Other companies, like AllPeers, are working on embedding a P2P client in a standard browser. All this is good job, helping the general public to use P2P networks transparently.
And at the end, having set up efficient P2P infrastructures and useful embedded or packaged P2P clients, we have to find the answer to this question :
“How to allow Internet consumers to easily find interesting contents, to freely discover a movie with a preview, without any piracy risk for the right holder?”
DRM technologies are a huge mistake: they lock the content on a device, whereas the Internet is a way to let th epeople share and recommend what they like. Why not let the consumer be a part of the distribution channel ?
Some solutions are emerging to replace DRM by “DUM” : “Digital Usage Management” : files can be freely copied, shared, redistributed among users, but their use remains under control… we are working in that area at UbicMedia, to bring a smart answer to those questions:
- “How to monetize P2P networks without using DRM to protect the contents?”
- “How to promote & sell “long tail” multimedia contents with very low distribution cost?”
- “How to combine P2P downloading with optimized streaming to facilitate the circulation of multimedia content over the Internet, with a total control of their use by the right owners ?
See also :
http://www.killerstartups.com/.....tion-Game/
If you want to watch full episodes in HD quality check out http://www.tv3o.com
From cbs - CSI, Shark and The big bang theory to FOX - Back to you and prison break.
Now these people are smart!
They sent five reps to my office, crawling, begging, “we will do whatever you want sir Mr. Ballmer sir!”
Four of them were waering fishnets ….
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
pretty soon sinkers are going to be very big company because this field is expanding very fast