The Guardian is reporting that “…millions of Arabs across the Middle East and north Africa are watching vivid and often shocking coverage of the Israeli military onslaught on Hamas in the Gaza Strip on Arabic satellite TV channels, with al-Jazeera again leading the field.”

The Guardian article goes on to say that “Al-Jazeera has also just become available to computer users live over broadband on the Livestation Network in every country except the US, where it is blocked.”

This is not quite true. Al Jazeera English is available world-wide, although the agreement for streaming Al Jazeera Arabic on Livestation, drawn up by Al Jazeera’s distribution team in Doha, requires that we geoblock it from being seen in the USA.

We have certainly seen a massive increase in traffic to the Livestation streams of both the Al-Jaeera English and al Jaeera Arabic channels. There has also been non-stop chat in the chat room linked to the stream as up to 50 people at a time have been discussing the developing situation.

The live, instant chat in the Al Jazeera English chat room has thrown up some fascinating discussions with people posting from all over the world. Anyone can join the chat and discuss the live events as you watch them unfold.

Al Jazeera would do well to have a news producer sitting in on the chat and stimulating the debate.

Live, instant newsgathering on the desktop - it has to be the future.

Last week I had my first inter-active-view and it was mind opening.

I sat down in the Bakery (see note below), the Livestation development office in London, in front of a steaming cup of tea and Jemima Kiss, the Guardian media/tech correspondent turned blogger and Uber Twitter-er to talk about iPhones, live TV online, Tv2.0 and quite a few other interesting things.

The most exciting thing was that this chat was being broadcast live on Livestation to anyone who cared to tune in. Unlike traditional TV channels, this channel was available anywhere in the word to anyone with a broadband connection and a free Livestation account.

When we set out almost 2 years ago working on the Livestation idea, it did not occur to us that the main dimension on which we could have innovated the most was on the interactive services around live broadcast.

Sitting in front of Jemima chatting about the future of TV while viewers from around the world were asking interesting and provocative questions and voting on contextual polls, gave the interview a completely new dimension. It didn’t feel at all like it was just the two of us talking. It really felt like having an open conversation with a lot of other people. And the most amazing thing was that it felt like they were all there with us, in the same room.

We could chat, respond and interact with them as if they were there. And this thanks to two simple tools we developed in the past few weeks: live chat and live
panel. Live chat is a channel-based chat room environment which allows viewers to join an interactive discussion around a live channel. This is available on all channels but it really comes to live when used in the context of live interviews/debates.

Al Jazeera has been experimenting with this tool in the last weeks during the high profile Riz Khan Show (generally on at 8.30pm Monday to Thursday) where Riz interviews high profile guests and a producer from the show joins the Livestation live chat room to allow viewers to have their questions passed on air.

Live Panel is a simple service that leverages our real-time 2-way messaging system to deliver multiple choice questions to anybody tuned onto a specific channel and reports the combined results of the poll in graphical format to all participants within seconds.

I heard these tools were working very well but didn’t really experience them first hand until last week.

Being on air live where the audience becomes an active part of the broadcast is absolutely amazing.

We had viewers from all parts of the world (the broadcast was at 5pm GMT to allow people from most time zones to join in) engaging and asking some excellent and provocative questions with a pace that was comparable only to “first person” situations where the audience is there asking questions and having an opportunity to add more details or refute answers given by the guests.

This is why I like to think this was not an interview but my first ever inter-active-view, an interactive interview where the viewers are there with you.

This brings me to the following idea: television means litterarly “viewing from far away” – tele is “far away” in Greek and vision is “to see” in latin. In the early days of television, its role was indeed that: show you what was going on in other parts of the world without having to travel there. Later on, TV executives worked out that they could use this newly created medium to distribute pre-recorded content but in the beginning, television was predominantly live.

So, what does it really mean to put TV online? Is it simply about giving access to traditional TV on IP connected devices? Surely that’s useful but it’s hard to classify that as TV2.0 as that’s more like giving extended access to TV1.0 on different devices.

What I think TV2.0 should be about is turning tele-vision into tele-presence. This is the really exciting novelty and opportunity brought about by the net. It’s not simply watching TV on your computer or your iPhone – that’s cool but not Tv2.0 in my view – but it is interacting with the broadcast, changing the way to develops live, on air; it’s having an impact on news and events without having to be there. It’s being able to influence how an interview with the former Prime Minister of Iraq develops on the Riz Khan show in Mumbai or Doha without having to be there in person.

I can ask uncomfortable questions, I can express my opinion using live polls or I can post a link to a recent article on a famous paper showing that the current guest being interviewed said exactly the opposite of what he is saying now just a few days ago in another interview.

The interview with Jemima is available here.

Welcome to the dawn of TV2.0. Be there now.

==========

The Bakery derives its name from the original name of the P2P research work carried out by Ant Rowstron and Miguel Castro at Microsoft Cambridge Research Labs which was called Pastry.

Skinkers acquired the IP from Microsoft and as the engineering team started working on Pastry we felt that The Bakery was the most appropriate name for it. The original work from Ant and Miguel is here.

Last Friday Livestation hosted our first instant interactive live chat session with some of the programme producers at Al Jazeera and our viewers during the first Presidential Debate.

While participating in the chat, something new and unexpected happened. I had a glimpse of a sort of collective “live” Wikipedia phenomenon: people in the chat room where not just expressing themselves but they were also policing what Obama and McCain were saying. Live.

As soon as one of them said something that contrasted with some claim made in the press, someone in the audience, as I would expect to be the case “ala wikipedia”, recalled the relevant piece on a newspaper and within 10 seconds the link to the article appeared in the chat.

The case in point was Obama attacking McCain on Iran and saying that the US should sit down with Iranian officials to discuss the situation without precondition. McCain argued that this was wrong; “…and therefore saying, they’ve probably been doing the right thing, because you will sit down across the table from them and that will legitimize their illegal behavior.”.

Obama then pointed out that McCain’s own advisor – Kissinger – said exactly the same thing: “Senator McCain mentioned Henry Kissinger, who’s one of his advisers, who, along with five recent secretaries of state, just said that we should meet with Iran — guess what — without precondition. This is one of your own advisers”.

And here’s the Livestation moment: one of the guys in the chatroom immediately posts the link to the article on ABC News about Kissinger saying just that (article is here).

What’s special about this? It verified the flow of information live. It cleared a doubt I had at that point: who’s misleading? Who’s right?

Knowing straightaway was very useful for me in particular during a debate designed specifically to help electors make up their mind on what to do with their vote.

I mention Wikipedia as it is serves the same “look-up” purpose but in an on-demand/time-shifted way. You hear something, you think “let me check it out on Wikipedia”. What I saw yesterday was a glimpse of the live version of this behaviour.

Another example of this type of Wisdom of the Crowds effect can be found in the popular TV game Who Wants to be a Millionaire when the contestant asks the audience to help with the answer (they always get it right).

If you can tap into the sum the individual knowledge and recollection capabilities of a group of users in real time you have a hugely powerful tool at your disposal: an instant verification tool for live TV.

Instant live interactive discussion with Al Jazeera’s programme producers on Livestation (9pm NY, 2am London).

Imagine being able to watch a live TV event while chatting about it in real time with the programme producers and other viewers. And imagine having some of your comments fed directly to the studio presenter and, possibly, influencing the direction of the discussion surrounding the live event.

Live TV often invites viewers to text in their comments via sms and email, and these are sometimes read out during the programme. Interactive TV offers red button functionality to encourage viewer feedback. And CNN will be running a live online forum discussion, with staffers taking part, during the Obama McCain presidential debate.

But mixing real time chat, between programme producers and viewers, as a live event is broadcast seems a move in the right direction, particularly when packaged in the player delivering the live TV stream.

So I will be watching Livestation’s streaming of Al Jazeera’s coverage of the presidential candidate’s debate tonight/tomorrow morning, with interest. I’ll be in the chat room just below the Livestation player along with a few of my Livestation colleagues, an Al Jazeera programme producer and loads of people I have never met before. Al Jazeera has a discussion-based programme built around the live debate with reaction from around the globe.

Any Livestation viewer can now be part of that global reaction.

If you don’t have the player, get it here.

I was reading an interesting post on paidcontent about Blinkx dropping their desktop app following the footsteps of Joost and iPlayer.

The overall conclusion is that having a downloadable app is more of a hurdle than a benefit.

I have spent the last 10 years working on desktop apps and I am now convinced that the “downloadable app argument” is a fallacy as the problem is simply framed in the wrong way.

The issues is not whether a downloadable app is an obstacle for users or not; the right way to frame the problem is around consumer value. The question should be: “Is it clear to consumers that by downloading this desktop application they will gain sufficient value to justify the leap of faith required to download it?”

There are several hugely successful services based on downloadable apps and they never had the problem of having to ask themselves if it was worth creating a web version of their service.

Desktop applications have the ability to offer unique features/service impossible to offer via a browser. The point is that if you are trying to offer to people a service that could be offered in a browser, why should they download the app? They will never see the value or the reason for doing so.

You could accuse Livestation of being victim of the same fallacy but in reality there a number of reasons why we believe we are not falling victims of this problem.

Livestation is built on a sophisticated P2P technology which has a special characteristic: it allows us to extend the availability of the service to a large number of viewers. Without it, the service would fall on its face at every large event (when people really want live streaming) and as it becomes more popular (as it is doing right now). P2P requires a download.

But I am sure some of you maybe thinking that our viewers don’t know and don’t worry about what’s under the bonnet, so we have packed the player with features that deliver clear and tangible value that would be very hard, if not impossible, to deliver via a browser.

The simple idea of aggregating your favourite streams from all over the Internet in one convenient player where you can flick between them with a click; alerts being pushed to your screen even when you are not watching for breaking news, or increased activity on a channel or when other viewers add new channels (all in the next release), live chat and the simple but hugely valuable, ability to run the player on top of all the other windows in the corner of your screen while you update your facebook pages or write an email to your mum.

The mistake made by many companies is to think that a technological advantage, such as saving bandwidth when downloading large files, is valuable enough for users to decide to install a plug-in or a file.

Here’s some examples to support my idea:

Skype: several hundreds of millions of downloads. Anyone every worried about having a web based version of Skype? Not that I know of.

IM: almost a billion messenger clients installed on pretty much every computer in the world… and all downloaded from the web.

Move Networks: more than 60 million plugins downloaded as they significantly improve the user experience when trying to watch something (in the browser) but nonetheless requiring a download.

(Scanning my system tray…)

BBC News Alerts: an app developed by my previous company Skinkers that sends you breaking news to the desktop and has a news ticker you can dock at the top/bottom of your screen to stay on top of the news. Huge number of downloads – can’t disclose the number because of client confidentiality ;-)

Off to pack even more useful features in the next release of Livestation.

The streaming of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) live from CERN on Livestation proved once more and overwhelmingly, if indeed it needed proving, the growing demand for live coverage of news events over broadband.

We pitched in to help the team at CERN in Switzerland meet that demand, as reported by David earlier, and as soon as they added a link to Livestation to the main streaming page on their site, our downloads started clocking at the amazing rate of 2/second.

At 8.30 GMT, we registered a 300% increase in requests/traffic on our system due to viewers following the “switch on” event on some of our partner channels (BBC World News, Euronews, etc). As we went live with the LHC stream a couple of hours later, traffic surged by 600% above our base level (watching during non-peak events).

Apart from being very impressed with our team ability to get the channel live in less than 2 hours, I am pretty impressed by how people are turning to the Internet more and more for their live TV needs.

It seems to me that there may be a natural tendency in people, verging on being almost a natural assumption, that live TV should be availalbe – somewhere – online.

I like the fact that we are making it easier for viewers to find what they are looking for in one place. I hope they like it too.

I expected our stats would be way up this morning following the release of the Livestation Mac client a couple of days ago, but 30 downloads a minute had me choking on my cornflakes. And I could have fried my eggs on the servers which were getting hot under the cover with almost 10,000 downloads in the past 24 hours.

Seems the bloggers had got hold of our news release and been busy overnight, which resulted in those nice people at Apple putting us on their main downloads page. Nice endorsement, suggesting that they feel Livestation is safe to download and a neat bit of kit.

Some interesting feedback comments, both good and bad, which is great because we are still in Beta with improvements and enhancements about to be released.

A positive note came from Denmark. “Your service and program for Mac OS X leopard is nothing short but brilliant. Fast, reliable, excellent visuals, controls and most importantly – no-fuss, always working, high quality TV feeds. Thumbs up!”

And some letting us know that some people are having problems, “Some high-quality channels don’t play on my MacBook Pro (Core2Duo 2.4GHz with 2GB of RAM, Leopard 10.5.4) at all. Although it uses almost all my bandwidth (ADSL – 600kbps downstream), only the very beginning of the video plays, then the audio starts to cut out and in, and finally everything stops, but it continues to use my bandwidth… It would be nice if the video/audio quality decrease when there isn’t bandwidth enough to play the stream, so users with slower connection around the globe could still watch the programs. It’s a great product, keep it up! ”.

It’s now approaching lunchtime and our site is creaking a bit as more and more people fire up their Livestation players.

Just the sort of problem we enjoy tackling.

Matteo Berlucchi
CEO, Livestation