Online TV: The Major Players
Joost, Miro, Babelgum & Veoh: Market Trends for Internet Television
Nov 21, 2007
Online TV is like cable, only with a much bigger selection of programs at your fingertips. It is tipped to be the next big thing with innovators signing deals with content providers.
Joost
Joost is a peer-to-peer based and is developed by the team that invented Skype and Kazaa. Joost has secured $45m in funding with Sequoia Capital (who originally backed Yahoo, Google and YouTube), CBS and other corporations taking small minority stakes in the start-up. Joost requires the download and installation of Windows software and the registration of user details. When Joost starts it is playing video immediately. It works by using the processing power of machines in the peer-to-peer network to send parts of a user's TV to them. In this way, Joost can distribute the load of all the user's TV viewing across all of the computers in the network. The alternative to this is to centralise this computing power and distribute content from a single point (which is how YouTube works). The advantage of Joost's approach is that everyone who joins the network is contributing to the whole system's computing power, allowing Joost to easily scale their product, in the same way they did for Skype.
Miro
Miro promote themselves as an open-source alternative to Joost. Miro is a Windows application but there is no registration of your details. Miro boasts 2,500 channels of non-DRM content, with HD available. Miro requires that a video is downloaded in its entirety before it can be watched. This has the advantage that once it is downloaded, the video playback will not suffer from jitter. However, the disadvantage is fundamental: this is not online TV. Miro breaks that model. Download removes the spontaneity of regular TV and requires a degree of organisation. Miro feels more like a program for downloading data, rather than an application to view online TV. Miro is significant because those behind it haven't gone down the route of DRM-compliance so it remains to be seen if they can convince enough content providers to sign up to it. Miro is built by the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF), a non-profit organisation based in Worcester, Massachusetts, who have secured funding from a number of foundations (the Rappaport Family Foundation, the Open Source Applications Foundation, and the Mozilla Foundation, among others) and other private donors.
Babelgum
Babelgum is similar to Joost. Babelgum is peer-to-peer based and requires the installation of Windows client software. The installation procedure is easy and registering of user details takes virtually no time. Babelgum then starts with the user logged in. The interface is very easy to use through the controller in the top left. Clicking on its green button brings up the main interface onto the channel selector and the search facility. There are currently thirteen channels with the usual offerings of news, sports and music, but Babelgum also offers niche programming, such as output from independent and short films, e.g., via the Rushes Soho Shorts Festival channel. The user can define their own playlists through the video list feature and can share their show ratings. Babelgum is backed by Silvio Scaglia's Babel Networks and is in open beta-test.
Veoh
Veoh has similarities with Joost and Babelgum. Veoh market themselves as supplying video ranging from home video to internet TV content. Veoh is also a Windows download and requires registration. The software is peer-to-peer and feels similar to Babelgum's. The user downloads the video, but Veoh starts to play it as soon as enough is buffered. When it starts up the user is presented with a full screen interface and a single menu leading to the 151 currently available channels. Content is available from CBS, PBS and NBC, together with YouTube and MySpace. Veoh is therefore covering all bases by providing access to both professionally produced content and user generated. The interface is very easy to use and the search facility displays popular searches, using bigger fonts to represent the more popular entries. Playback can be grainy as Veoh displays full-screen video content that was intended to be viewed in smaller windows; however, the user can resize the window. Veoh was founded in 2004 by Dmitry Shapiro and the company has raised $15m from VC and media investors such as Time Warner and Michael Eisner's Tornante Company.
The Online TV Market
Miro provides the least TV-like experience as the content has to be downloaded before it can be viewed. The others are all quite similar. Their interfaces are good and they give the user access to a comprehensive range of content. Their strategies differ in the types and location of content. Joost's content is exclusively professionally produced and it hosts all of its own content. The others have access to user generated content hosted elsewhere.
The big names behind these companies shows that online TV is something worth investing in as the company that is successful will win big. The viewing experience is OK from a PC and current content will attract the early adopters. However, moving people away from conventional TV to internet delivered content is a major step. Control over access to different types of content is a concern as is the removal of jitter in the playback. For the producers of TV content, do they want their movies and TV programs available in the same system that provides user generated content? Will they ultimately see this as something that devalues their brand?
Advertisers are currently using online TV as a marketing channel to advertise regular TV programs and movies. For online TV to really take-off, two things need to happen. Providing great content that can only be found online and the user experience needs to be as close to watching regular TV as possible. This means a user should be able to access online TV through the same TV they currently use to watch conventional TV. Making users sit at a PC to watch online content will forever fix in the user's mind that this is a different kind of TV.
