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It's been a long time coming but television on the Internet appears
finally to be taking off, opening up a new viewing experience for
free and helping to fight online piracy.
One of the newest services, Hulu, which was
launched a month ago in the United States, is backed by media giant
NBC Universal and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
The online video-on-demand (VOD) service
"will let you watch your favourite programmes anytime for
free", Hulu's youthful CEO Jason Kilar told a conference at the
giant MIPTV audiovisual entertainment industry trade show this week.
Geared to appeal to a wide audience, Hulu, which
is free but comes with short 15 to 30-second advertising spots that
fund the service, offers high picture and sound quality, Kilar said.
Another service that could prove a big hit is
that users can select any video content and embed it on their blog
or favourite Internet sites such as a MySpace page or Facebook,
where it can be shared with friends.
As well as offering Fox and NBC hits like
"The Simpsons" and "Heroes", Hulu has also inked
deals with about 50 leading content providers that include Sony
Pictures, Warner Bros. and National Geographic.
But while viewers can choose from 250 hit TV
series, they cannot watch any live shows and instead are
re-directed, if seeking "Grey's Anatomy" for example, to
the ABC website which does have the show.
Kilar said the plan was to make Hulu available
outside the US. "It can be a global service and that's our
aim," he said. But this will take time as the company would
need to negotiate content rights issues for each country.
In the meantime, the service looks set to meet
some formidable competition from TV broadcasters.
Britain's giant state-owned BBC Corporation
announced recently that it is teaming up with two of the country's
leading commercial channels, ITV and Channel 4, to launch an online
video joint venture around the middle of this year.
Setting aside their rivalries, the networks plan
to hit back at the growing challenge posed by hugely successful
Internet video-sharing sites such as YouTube, where their programmes
are regularly illegally downloaded.
Several web-based TV services have been launched
in the past few years. These include Joost that was set-up in 2006
by the Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, creators of the illegal
music file-sharing service Kazaa, as well as Babelgum, Vuze and Veoh,
which is the grand old man of the pack having been set-up in 2003.
Web-based TV, which is also sometimes called
Internet TV, is delivered over the open, public, global Internet
using legal peer-to-peer file-sharing technology.
This differs from IPTV, which uses a private,
"walled-garden" type of managed network.
Both Joost and Babelgum were launched last year
but industry experts are starting to question what sort of results
they and other fledgling web TV services are notching up.
These services have been criticised for not
offering enough content and for incomplete TV series, and recently
some have started to change track.
Joost is now concentrating on partnering with
major studio and TV networks. Babelgum is focusing on independent
films, sport, nature and travel, and Vuze is specialising in the
sci-fi and animation genres popular with young males.
"It's time to attack and not be
defensive," Kilar believes. "Internet users will find the
programme that they want with or without you. But if they're
downloading illegally, that's not going to generate any advertising
revenue for you," he pointed out.
The cost of running the sites, however, is very
high due to the heavy bandwidth.
"No one has come up yet with an effective
business model for ad-supported long-form video on the web and the
company that does might just hit on a gold mine," the
specialist next-generation media and entertainment magazine
FutureMedia underlined in its April edition.
-- AFP
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