BizJournals Portfolio
Home >   Business Views, Opinions and Blogs >   Business Blogs >   Tech Observer >  

Live Mass Market Web Tv Is A Big Deal

Tech Observer

by Kevin Maney
Main
Apple May Have Already Sold 10 Million iPhone 3Gs   Sony's New Vaio Takes Aim at Apple's iMac

Recent Blog Posts

Links

Oct 07 2008 11:28am EDT

Live, Mass-market Web TV is a Big Deal

Kevin Maney writes: A little more than a year ago, I was at Joost's New York headquarters listening to CEO Mike Volpi talk about a big project at Joost to get live broadcasts of mass-market events like college basketball games to work. Sending high-quality stored and forwarded video around the Web has only been really workable for a couple of years. Live niche TV -- something like UStream -- has been workable for about that long, too. But serving tens of millions of video streams at once -- with little delay and little buffering -- has been a problem that Joost, Hulu, Microsoft and others have only recently solved.


AOL did it with the Live8 in 2005 -- but then-CEO Jon Miller told me it only worked because AOL spent massive amounts of money on the servers and bandwidth -- not something that you want to do every day.

Tonight, Hulu for the first time will offer a live broadcast -- of the presidential debates.

Live TV will be a big deal for the Web. It paves the way for sports, news, live concerts and other programming that will help make Web video a true competitor to television.

...

Comments

If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.


Connect With Portfolio.com
Like Portfolio on Facebook

Come on, like us—you know you want to.

Follow Portfolio on Twitter

Follow us and if you're an innovative entrepreneur, we'll return the favor.

The Mix

Today's top stories, conversation starters, and the back nine business bites.

spotlight on

Slideshows

500 Startups Hits New York

Dave McClure's brainchild makes its way to New York and introduces East Coast money folks to some intriguing new companies. View Slideshow