A UK company touting its patented streaming technology as High Definition, is launching a 50 channel TV service over the internet, rivalling the BBC iPlayer and other over the internet TV businesses and saying that it has licensed 13,000 movies and will eventually carry 2,500 TV channels.
Using the term ‘virtual cable TV service’ FilmOn.com comes from a company traded on the Frankfurt exchange called FilmOn.com Plc and currently shown to be valued at €640 million, even though it has only just gone public. The company is backed by Alki David, known as one of the richest men in the UK and a promotional video on the site says that over the next year $200 million in advertising will be spent promoting the service.
Right now it looks like it is a pale imitation of Joost and Babelgum, with less function and very clearly released in beta. The site requires the download of its own media player, something that has slowed down the development of many online video services, although it is a fairly idiot-proof installation. However many of the controls (such as channel change) are not yet ready on the downloadable player although it claims to have 50 TV channels including BBC 1, ITV, Sky News, CNN, ESPN and Bloomberg. The channels run live just as they would from a TV screen, although the system has the ability to pause live TV.
The company claims to have wowed experts in the field with its picture and sound clarity and speed of transfer. But speaking as one expert, while it is reasonable high quality video, this is typically at or just below the standard set by companies like Move Networks.
The technology behind the service is barely explained and we hope to find out a little more about it next week, but it talks about an advanced networking protocol which it calls MCDS and says it is a data management system based on open source technology, originally created at Switzerland’s CERN (where the first web browser was designed). This has now been improved by the FilmOn team for audio and video transport streams and is said to harness redundant computing resources from Internet Cloud Providers. It also suggests that it goes through some kind of pricing check for the right connection as well as handling an adaptive streaming negotiation.
It boasts a new codec and says it uses grid computing power to deliver broadcast quality video up to 1080p on a 1 Mbps connection. This is pretty much impossible we suspect, although something similar was claimed by Broadcast International using its CodecSys system and perhaps it is using this or something like it. CodecSys uses multiple codecs and then compares the output of each of them for a given GOP (group of pictures) and then picks the one that uses least bandwidth.
All of this technology so far sounds like so much window dressing to us, and unlikely to warrant the patents the company claims to have. But the point we make in our other story this week about Joost (thought to be up for sale) holds true for this company, it doesn’t need a technology edge, it needs masses of content and ease of use.
The video files delivered by FilmOn are claimed to be DRM protected (again no detail of how or what DRM system is used) but can be burned to a DVD for either ownership or rental (we suspect a system where the key is held inside the PC so that the DVD is useless without the PC and the software).
No-one could tell us the video format, whether it was Adobe Flash video or Silverlight or what, just that it had three playback speeds. The site also offers video owners content tools for editing and managing and uploading video assets for monetization ‘ so it is as much a rival to BrightCove as it is to the BBC iPlayer.
The tools will allow the creation of a branded portal and there is an example there of a Coca Cola portal, overlaying the existing FilmON service.
The other TV channels FilmOn talks about aren’t actually terrestrial channels, but instead are created by a piece of content aggregation software which scours the internet and finds content for the other channels. Not quite sure as yet how this sits in terms of rights or video quality.
FilmOn says that it can be viewed on a PC, an internet enabled television and even on 3G Mobile phones. If it looks like it is genuine in all these claims, we’ll let you know.