Zattoo: Bringing the World’s Television to Your PC

Zattoo is a website that allows you to watch streaming, live television programs from around the world on your PC. Zattoo was launched in 2005 by Sugih Jamin, Beat Knecht and Wenjie Wang and can be accessed in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, and, most recently, France.  Eight countries in three years–keep checking the website because Zattoo will be steadily adding the rest of the world.

Eco, the German Association of Internet Business, presented Zattoo with the 2008 award for outstanding and innovative achievement. If you were wondering about past winners, Google took home the prize in 2006.  The following is an interview with Chairman and Co-Founder Sugih Jamin:

Hi, I love your site, when is Zattoo coming to the United States?

That will be awhile. The issues are so much more convoluted in the United States.

Do you mean in terms of copyrights?

Yes.

How will Zattoo affect the journalistic world in the coming future?

It has actually already made an impact. Many journalists in Europe like to have Zattoo running on the desktop all the time. They sometimes tell us that they got a story from Zattoo before they were told about it by their internal sources. Also, now every journalist can have the different channels they want to view on the desktops of their computers instead of having to have a television.

How about for normal people watching the news?

We have actually found that news viewing is not the number one channel, sports is the most popular, but even cultural programs or feature films are higher rated. News is niche; the majority of people are not glued to CNN and the news channels. It’s actually something like 0.3 percent of our viewership.

Was it a coincidence that Zattoo was launched just before the 2005 World Cup?

[laughs] No it was not a coincidence.

Might the lack of news viewers have something to do with the majority of your viewers being between 18 and 44?

Well you know, this should be the age group that would be most interested in the news, this is the productive age of a person’s life. However, if there’s any breaking news Zattoo becomes an important vehicle. During the primaries, Zattoo became very popular and many people in Europe were watching CNN International and ABC News Now.

Is Zattoo the only player of its kind?

The difference between Zattoo and other video applications is that we carry live broadcast TV, although recently I have heard about some other companies that might be doing something similar, but I know that when we started we were the first. For instance, now in the UK, the BBC is putting some of its broadcasts online, they have their iPlayer.

What is the process of signing up a new broadcast outlet?

The relationship with every broadcaster is different, as are the rules from country to country. Like in the UK if material is originated in a specific region it can only be broadcast in that region. Or with ABC News Now, for example, we have a contractual agreement that allows us to broadcast to some countries in Europe.

How does the signal then get to someone’s computer?

After we set up the agreement, we take the signal off satellite and then put it into digital format and put it into our peer-to-peer network.

Can you explain the peer-to-peer network for me?

If you are the only viewer of a particular station, then you get your video stream from our broadcast center. The next guy can only get four fifths of the stream from our video broadcast center, and will get the rest of it from the first guy. The more peers, the more they receive the broadcast stream from each other.

Does this cause much of a delay?

If it’s world cup, the delay might be between 8 and 10 seconds, it also depends on where you get your source from. Also it might be just the satellite that’s delayed and not the network. Sometimes it even works the other way and you get the signal faster than from television.

What is in store for the future?

We have a patent for our player and we are trying to increasingly monetize the player. A lot of this is from ad revenue, for example, when you switch from one channel to another it takes us three to eight sec to switch you, so when we put up an ad, we have to stretch that time to 15 seconds. That fifteen seconds is what the advertiser demands. Moving forward we’ll be producing better targeting of ads, including ads that will contain links within the ads themselves.