The World In Motion

September is set to be a quiet blogging month on IPTV Times. With the rugby world cup in full swing, things even more important than reinventing the world of TV take precedence.

However, these two world have converged. Many of you who know me will know that I started Narrowstep as a company because I struggled in watching Welsh rugby matches when in the US. The only option was paying $20 at an Irish bar and seeing the Setanta satellite feed.

But now things have come a full circle. Our own client, ITV Local is showing interviews, highlights and reviews and all the matches are available in full at http://www.rugbywolrdcupvideo.com/, using MediaZone's technology. The service is OK - using WM DRM, so no good to Mac users, a bit clunky and with dreadful encoding quality for the streams at 650Kbps (all the matches are available in full 24h after they were shown on telly). There is the alternative of a download, but I really don't have the patience to use download services after my experience with 4OD and 5. But, for $50 I don't think you can complain.

What all of this is indicative of, though, is that internet TV has finally become mainstream. It's impossible to ignore when managing major events and the commercial models are becoming profitable.

There's still a trade off of availability against price, but we've come a long way...

Comments

The VP said…
We have changed the encoding since the weekend - the image is now twice the size and looks great at 650K.

Please can you let me know what you think of it now.
Iolo Jones said…
I can confirm that it looks a lot better - it even competes with the crunchy picture I'm getting on ITV4!

Top customer care, MediaZone team!