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Live, Mass-market Web TV is a Big Deal
by Kevin Maney
Oct 07, 2008
Oct 07, 2008
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.
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