Another player

One of the most exciting web video applications has just come to the UK. It’s been slowly rolling out across Europe with TV partners including France television, TVE, CNN and the BBC for the last year or so.

It’s more than just the ‘one show at a time’ on demand players that are everywhere else and everyone else is developing. Zattoo is more of a replacement for Cable or Satellite.

The service lets you watch, depending on where you live, live television channels on the internet. It looks like they plan to extend it to include Joost style content channels with shows from indie producers - but for now it’s the TV channels you’d get over the air.

Channels

The UK player gives me all the BBC Channels - BBC ONE, BBC TWO, BBC THREE, BBC FOUR, BBC News 24, CBBC and Cbeebies and I’m sure that list will expand when it leaves beta.

As the service launches the company have said, in the FAQ section, that they plan to launch paid services on top of the free channels available in each area - so this really could be a contender for Cable/Satellite.

What we need now is for boxes like the XBox, Playstation 3 and AppleTV to support ‘external applications’ like Joost or Zattoo and then we can watch them on TV instead of the computer.

The quality is very good - obviously not live TV quality but close enough for watching comfortably on a computer. It’s good enough for me to be able to let my wife watch a shitty soap on the main TV while I watch something else on the computer.

And, considering it’s a steamed service, I’ve had it on for an hour now with no buffering at all - and it only takes a couple of seconds to buffer when you switch to another stream.

I’d like to be able to get channels from other countries - France Television would be a fun way of brushing up on my French - or even get some indie content on there - but for now this looks like a strong contender for the ‘top player’ position.

Other Players

But it’s still ‘another player’. I already have Joost, 4OD, Democracy, iTunes and now Zattoo - soon I’ll be adding the BBC iPlayer and if I ever decide to pay Murdoch the SKY player as well. Then if they ever start offering UK content I’ll add the Vuze player.

Add to that all the content thats steamed online from places like You Tube and soon ITV.com and, although there’s a wealth of content, there’s also a pain in the arse of a system drain.

So I’ve now got 4OD, Joost, Vuze, Zattoo, iTunes and Democracy on my computer - all fighting for system resources. Soon I’ll have the iPlayer and if it’s anything like the iMP trial that will be a drain as well.

How are we going to get around the ‘multiple players’ problem. Is it possible to create a single integrated player that pulls on APIs and feeds from the others or do we just have to live with it.

What about a third party add on system for the AppleTV or XBox 360 - the ability to install all the players on there instead of the PC.

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