We immediately asked Widevine what it means by claiming that this is a world first, but no-one has got back to us yet, but the deal it announced this week is certainly a potential money spinner as it lands the Big Pond account, the ISP owned by Australia’s telco Telstra.
Telstra has previously sold video content as either a download or a progressive downloads in the past and will be adopting Widevine’s Adaptive Streaming technology, alongside its DRM system, to deliver and protect TV offerings.
In announcing its half year financial results this year Telstra promised investors an aggressive approach to upgrading broadband lines until they were capable of delivering HD movies and TV shows.
What Widevine seems to be saying is unique about this deal is that live TV is going to be sent across the web to Big Pond TV users, as well as VoD movies. Telstra’s BigPond TV service already offers seven channels of television content and says quite clearly that it will improve visual quality when the Widevine system goes live. The service will be available on a range of devices including TVs and Blu-ray players from LG Electronics and Samsung from later this year and from Telstra’s T-Box set top box in 2011.
There are plenty of high volume Over The Top services, for instance from broadcasters in practically every country in Europe, but for the most part they are catch up TV services, showing the best of broadcast programming at least a day later than it was broadcast and none we know is offering live channels. So that may well be what Widevine is claiming as a first.
TV over the internet in Australia appears to be a straight fight between the Telstra’s T Box and Fetch TV, which launched earlier this year using encoders from Envivio and set tops from Netgem, charging around A$30 a month for TV service. We understand that Fetch TV uses Microsoft IIS Smooth streaming. The moment Fetch TV used that technology Telstra immediately had to respond and upgrade to an accepted adaptive streaming system.