February 19, 2008
Livestation Expands Technical Trial, Hires Chris Cramer
By Nathaniel S. Berke

An example of a news item written for World Screen Newsflash, a newsletter sent daily to more than 45,000 television executives via email.

LONDON, February 19: As Livestation, a peer-to-peer live-streaming news aggregator built by the Internet tech outfit Skinkers, enters a new round of technical trials, the company’s founder, Matteo Berlucchi, tells World Screen Newsflash that technology such as his will change the way international broadcast rights work.

To help support Livestation, Skinkers’ first endeavor in media broadcasting, the company has hired the former president of CNN, Chris Cramer, as a strategic advisor. Cramer bulks up Livestation’s roster of media industry veterans, which also includes Philip Rowley, the former chairman and CEO of AOL Europe; Dr. William Cooper, the former head of interactive at BBC Broadcast; and David McAdam, the former head of operations at ITV.com. The set is expected to complement Skinkers’ technical expertise with insight into the media industry.

“The combination of Philip with his media background and Chris with his news background I think is perfect for LiveStation,” Berlucchi tells World Screen Newsflash. “My expectation from Chris and Philip is to help us in finding the best possible proposition for end-users and broadcasters alike. I’m privileged to work with these two guys because they’re very smart and very experienced.”

Livestation is a free downloadable platform that streams live television news over a peer-to-peer broadband-based network. The latest phase of the technical trial expands the network’s channel lineup beyond the single-channel test offering, picking up feeds from the BBC, Bloomberg News, EuroNews, France 24 and Al Jazeera. The new multichannel offering will test user behavior and, according to Berlucchi, is very important to creating a television-like experience.

“Doing one channel is one thing, doing two channels is a very different bag because you have the mental problem of changing the channel,” Berlucchi says. “People expect to switch channels reasonable quickly, because you have 70 years of experience with real television. If you change channels with television, imagine if you had to wait 10 seconds every time. That wouldn’t be a very good user-experience.”

The technology, based on software developed by Microsoft Research, began its first closed tests last year carrying only BBC News channel and was used to test the behavior and scalability of the peer-to-peer software. The latest test remains closed, but login information has been sent to approximately 30,000 users who signed up for the wait-list prior to the second testing phase.

In the U.S., users can access Al Jazeera, France 24 (English and French) and the radio feeds of BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service. While several other broadcasters have signed on to provide feeds, the channels available differ from region to region because of rights. Berlucchi believes this may only be a temporary setback, as Internet-based technology such as Livestation will ultimately change the way rights are bought and sold.

“This is one of the errors that I think the Internet is going to change in the next 24 months,” he says. “The whole thing about rights and geographies I think is seriously put under discussion when you put things on the Internet. Because while a cable network and satellite network are very geographical by nature, the Internet is the least geographically structured thing in the world; it’s completely flat and open.”

Currently, Berlucchi says the go-to market strategy is fully focused on live news. Pending the platform’s success, Livestation will widen its mandate to include sports and entertainment, “but the focus is very much on live,” he says. “That’s the underpinning idea—whatever is live and people should see now, rather than on-demand or pre-recorded.” He adds that the company will continue to recruit top-tier broadcasters from around the world, and to cover as many of the primary languages as possible.

Livestation is expected to move into a public beta test at the end of spring, and the commercial launch is slated for the second part of this year. Though, he notes, “Schedule dates are extremely movable in this world.”

The London-based Skinkers was first established in 2001 as a software solutions firm for information broadcast. Its specialty is in desktop alert technology, software that pushes information onto users’ desktops, such as UPS’s shipment tracking alerts. Past media clients include the BBC, CNN, Sky, Discovery, Channel 4, MTV and Warner Bros., among others.