Voddler: “A Spotify for Video”
The Swedish music service Spotify is streaming music for more than 4 million users in 8 countries, just after one year of the hyped service launching. Few weeks ago, Spotify took the next step with the Apple Iphone App and Google Android App.
However, streaming music from a server to a PC is not rocket science. You just need a fast and user friendly interface. The main challenge remains to convince the record labels that you have a good business model and sign DMCA contracts for millions of songs. This is what Spotify succeeded with, and showed that there is an alternative for illegal file sharing.
Everyone expects now a similar service for streaming movies and TV programs over the internet, but the case is not as easy as in the music world. The main issue is bandwidth. Video requires much more bandwidth than music which means that in the traditional streaming technology – streaming from a server to a computer or usual file sharing. When the number of users increases, capacity issues and hence costs will increase tremendously. If we take Youtube for example, many sources have said that the costs are much higher than the revenues. And yet they are only streaming short and low quality videos (HD is an option not available for all videos). Read more…
