Livestation: Sling Without the Box

Allen Weiner, Managing VP, GARTNER

20 April 2007

Certainly not as physically large as the display at the large broadcast engineering booths at the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB2007), but of perhaps greater significance, is Livestation. Livestation is an effort from U.K.-based Skinkers, a firm that builds and manages RSS delivery ecosystems. It is alpha-testing a new system for delivering an unlimited number of live TV channels to the desktop.

The solution is software-based and is built on top of Pastry, a peer-to-peer technology developed by Microsoft Research primarily in its Cambridge, U.K., labs. This flavor of P2P is secure and robust, requires less server-side infrastructure, because of its ability to optimize the network, and is suited for live streaming, while most P2P applications are focused on the on-demand streaming market.

The demo of Livestation, which showed a good-quality picture from the BBC in the midst of a bandwidth-hogging tech show, has another thing going for it - its ability to leverage Microsoft's new Silverlight platform to create "content experiences" based on Livestation's streams. Has interactive TV finally found its way to the consumer?

So, the threats to cable and satellite, and for that matter IPTV, begin to line up. Certainly Joost is up there giving the cable and telephone companies something to worry about, but Livestation (in which Microsoft has an equity stake) could be a bigger game changer as a viable live platform for the TV 2.0 crowd, as well as other content providers looking for new ways to reach the digital consumer.

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