Interesting news this morning surrounding the launch of Zattoo – a Swiss/US startup that retransmits content from UK terrestrial broadcasters online, paying them commission according to subscriber numbers.
At the annoyance of the main UK players, Zattoo appears to have slipped under the radar of copyright law. Or at least no one has yet succeeded in unravelling the growing tangle of internet legislation to work out whether this is actually legal or not.
Either way the company has an interesting model, simply broadcasting terrestrial content online and inserting ads every time a user switches channels (a tactic that could be quite successful with today’s channel switching population). The service already has over 2m subscribers in old-Europe so could become quite lucrative.
However, more so than many ‘download to own’ players, Zattoo’s streaming service will require a big slice of bandwidth, so is subject to the limiting constraints of the UK’s network infrastructure and the types of deals internet users are currently signed up to.
Whether this latest company will do any better than those that have gone before remains to be seen. What is clear is that the UK broadcasters should look on this launch as an opportunity, not a threat. No one has clearly won the war between 4OD, iPlayer and ITV.com, and the Zattoo service only streams live media so is not a threat to these or their planned ‘Project Kangaroo’ service.
Zattoo provides a new outlet for terrestrial content and could help garner a wider audience and possible new revenue. UK broadcasters would do well to look at the growing number of questionably legal streaming TV services now online to see just how well this could go down.
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