This morning, I covered Skinker/MSFT’s Livestation product, which strives to stream live video online. TechCrunch notes that: “While it is certainly an excellent demonstration of the flexibility of Silverlight, its not even close to being productized and launched. For now, consider it little more than a pretty video.”
Don Dodge, of MSFT, lists down the product benefits and specs:
- LiveStation uses Peer-to-Peer technology to distribute the TV signal, so it doesn’t require a big server infrastructure and lots of bandwidth. The P2P technology was developed at Microsoft’s Cambridge research lab and functions similar to BitTorrent.
- Silverlight allows the video to be displayed in very high quality, and with amazing speed. Silverlight was unveiled at MIX07 earlier this year to rave reviews. LiveStation shows off the power and elegance of Silverlight.
- Live TV, this isn’t recorded TV being re-broadcast…it is live, without delay. Of course the technology could be modified to stream recorded shows or other types of content.
- TV on your cell phone? Silverlight runs on cell phones, so in the future LiveStation could deliver Live TV directly to your cell phone or mobile device.
It should be noted, or asked, even if the technology was ready to go, how many TV companies would jump on this? Sure, users might want to be able to watch things live (sports, news, etc) online via laptops, PCs etc., but the user experience is not the same. But say that’s moot, would the rights-holders really welcome this?
TV is a $75B ad market, the Web is a $17B market, and video online is less than $1B. It could be argued that such a product would accelerate the rush of ad dollars from TV to the Web, but reread that sentence and ask yourself once again if TV media firms would welcome that?
After all, on TV, the major networks command the lion’s share of ad dollars; online, not so. Not at all in fact.
Maybe the Web will shrink advertising on TV over time, and not just surpass it in 2021. Now you sort of understand the envy and angst if TV executives, don’t you?
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