It sure took them a while, but at least this time they started before the competition's product went final, was a huge hit and had a massive userbase.
Microsoft Research has teamed up Skinkers Limited to offer live broadcasting of television on your computer by means of a p2p network. The service uses Silverlight, Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash, to playback the content on the broadcasted channels. "Imagine your audience being able to watch your live TV content at their desktop, at the airport, at home and in fact, anywhere they can get an Internet connection to their PC! Imagine a quality image with no buffering or stopping! Imagine the possibilities of being able to allow your audience to 'click' on a TV advert exactly as they do on the web but while watching your existing TV channels. All without having to change your current business processes in the slightest!" Let's hope when the two go at it, they'll not only be fighting for picture quality and reliability but for less advertisements as well. The beta program will start small, but all requests will be considered as more testers are needed.
Link: LiveStation Beta Signup | Home Page
1 comments:
Hey guys,
Thanks for the post. We are really excited to see that you are finding the LiveStation idea interesting. We are working very hard on trying to bring a "television-like" experience to the computer.
I'd like to add a couple of important comments though:
1. While Microsoft has a minority stake in Skinkers (the company developing LiveStation), this project is very much our own initiative. We are developing the platform on technology originally developed by Microsoft Research in Cambridge but now it's fair to say that we are going forward with our own engineers (with the occasional phone-call to the MS researchers for hard-to-find answers!).
2. Unlike what some people are saying, we are definitely NOT TAKING ON Joost! We love Joost and think it's a great idea, but we are trying to do something different and complementary: we are trying to get live television on the computer. We believe that the user experience with streaming so far has never been really good enough. We hope to move the user experience a step forward and maybe to the point where people will look at LiveStation and think "Wow, I can ACTUALLY watch this and keep it on my computer".
Thanks again for the support and interest but please don't go around shouting "Microsoft is taking on Joost". The correct slogan should be "Skinkers is trying to get TV working on the computer!" and I can assure you, it is fun but very hard!
All the best.
The LiveStation Team
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