zattoo is a great little app that at first i was really shocked with the level of performance that it gave. Utilziing a great codec and compression and using p2p technology zattoo delivers on providing you with live television. Some of the BBC channels got me thinking how it was legal and i noticed this morning that bbc1 seems to have now vanished. Also now when i select BBC Three and BBC Four i get a message saying "the channel is scrambled or not available" which is interesting.
Lifted from the website they say that the system is legal.
_Yes. Zattoo acquires the rights to retransmit the channels separately for each country we launch in. It takes a lot of legwork (read: flight miles and sizzling phone lines) to collect the necessary rights to transmit the channels. Unlike the fast food world, the media world doesn't operate on a global basis, so if we acquire the rights to carry a French TV channel in Switzerland, say, we don't automatically get the right to carry it also in France or Germany.
All of this doesn't deter us, of course. Chances actually are that we're talking to a broadcaster somewhere right now, as you are reading this. So stay tuned for more channels in Z-countries and a launch in countries that haven't been zattooed yet. _
The tech specs are that the stream is coming in @ Resolution: 352×288 (wide screen: 480×288) - Downstream rate: 500 Kbits/second and using the old faithful H.264 codec.
Zattoo was founded in 2005 by Sugih Jamin, Beat Knecht, and Wenjie Wang. The three co-founders are supported by a team of currently around 50 people, stationed in Ann Arbor, USA, and Zurich, Switzerland. Oh and i just found a UK category on their blog
