Livestation Expands Technical Trial, Hires Chris Cramer

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.

—By Ned Berke