Skinkers Is Bringing Live TV To Your Desktop - Join The Beta

Thu, Jul 5, 2007

Beta, Joost, Microsoft

Livestation is currently a project under development, and a joint effort from Skinkers and Microsoft.

Read on if you are interested in testing it.

LiveStation is currently in beta stage, but essentially the project is designed to enable users to watch live television on their machines. “Interactive live TV on the PC that works” is in fact the slogan under which the LiveStation beta project went live. “LiveStation is a software solution, co-developed with Microsoft Research, designed to allow people to watch live TV on their in a highly scalable way and without requiring broadcasters to invest a large amount of money in hardware and infrastructure,” reveals a message posted on the LiveStation.

LiveStation has as its foundation peer-to-peer built together by Skinkers and Microsoft Research. The bottom line is that the project should produce a solution that will combine security, stability and scalability in order to enable users to streamline live TV over the Internet.

If you are interested in joining the Livestation beta, then sign up and mention that Steve Clayton in the “where you heard from” field. You can read more on Steve Clayton’s blog.

Below you can see the interview with Matteo Berlucchi from Skinkers and a live demo.


LiveStation Demo


Matteo Berlucchi

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Viewing 3 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Hey guys,

    Thanks for the post. We are really excited to see that you are finding the LiveStation idea interesting. We are working very hard on trying to bring a "television-like" experience to the computer.

    I'd like to add a couple of important comments though:

    1. While Microsoft has a minority stake in Skinkers (the company developing LiveStation), this project is very much our own initiative. We are developing the platform on technology originally developed by Microsoft Research in Cambridge but now it's fair to say that we are going forward with our own engineers (with the occasional phone-call to the MS researchers for hard-to-find answers!).

    2. Unlike what some people are saying, we are definitely NOT TAKING ON Joost! We love Joost and think it's a great idea, but we are trying to do something different and complementary: we are trying to get live television on the computer. We believe that the user experience with streaming so far has never been really good enough. We hope to move the user experience a step forward and maybe to the point where people will look at LiveStation and think "Wow, I can ACTUALLY watch this and keep it on my computer".

    Thanks again for the support and interest but please don't go around shouting "Microsoft is taking on Joost". The correct slogan should be "Skinkers is trying to get TV working on the computer!" and I can assure you, it is fun but very hard!

    All the best.

    The LiveStation Team
    • ^
    • v
    Matteo:

    Thank you very much for taking the time to comment!

    I think you project sounds really interesting. Live TV would be a great addition to Joost. To be honest usually I would prefer live TV over the broadcasted shows.

    I promise you the next time I write an article about Livestation I won't shout that you are taking on Joost :-)

    I can even be bribed with a beta invitation ;)
    • ^
    • v
    Don’t forget, Microsoft is a Joost advertiser. This is not a “Joost Killer”, it is hardly a rival. I’m happy that I use Ubuntu and don’t have to put up with this garbage. Joost will soon be available for Linux, anyway.

    As for the Joost invites, it's just a copy of Google's Gmail publicity stunt. Gets a lot of Diggs, that's all.
 

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus