General

Single Malt Internet Television

In the age of infinite channels, every hobby gets its own, and the expensive hobbies will have better-funded channels. But can the owners of the pipes make money from the trend?

by Gerry Blackwell [November 17, 2006]

The age of the million-channel universe is dawning and Narrowstep, a company headquartered in the UK and now traded publicly in the U.S., figures it's in on the ground floor.

Narrowstep offers an end-to-end solution, a combination of software and services, including hosting, to help companies set up TV-like streaming video channels on the internet. It currently has more than 100 channels up and running, most originating in Europe, but the company is growing fast and starting to make inroads in America.

"It's a very hot space," Narrowstep president and CEO Stephen Beaumont says of broadband TV. "You can certainly see that from the growth we're enjoying, but I think 2007 will really be the year [it takes off]."

ISPs have in recent times focused more on the IPTV opportunity, not surprisingly. Delivering pay TV over broadband internet connections provides new revenue streams and lets ISPs offer the complete "triple play"—phone, Internet, TV—that many believe is crucial for maintaining subscriber loyalty.

But the big broadband pipes that are enabling IPTV can as easily—probably more easily—enable the Narrowstep model of internet TV. The question is, can ISPs benefit from it? Beaumont says they can. We remain skeptical.

The background
The notion of the million-channel universe has lost some currency in recent years, but back in the late 1990s when streaming video—bad as it then was—first began to appear on the Web, there was much talk of a new model of television in which programming would be delivered over the internet. Instead of the few hundred channels then possible with a traditional TV model, broadcasting—or narrowcasting—on the internet would make possible an infinite number of channels, including very specialized, niche offerings.

That's what Narrowstep is delivering today.

One of the company's recent new channels is one called SingleMalt.tv, devoted entirely to the Scotch whiskey aficionado. Others include Horse.tv for horse lovers, Namib.tv, all about the charms and attractions of the southern African nation of Namibia, Cycling.tv for cyclists, Mac.tv, for martial arts enthusiasts, and so on. On the other hand, ITV, the second broadcast television network in Britain, has recently launched itvLocal.tv, a much broader-based, multi-channel experiment in alternative broadcasting that the company is now expanding.

The user experience
When a viewer surfs to one of these channels—many are linked from the Narrowstep site—a base page loads first. In most cases, it immediately attempts to launch a new pop-up window with the Narrowstep Player. This of course triggers the pop-up blocker in your browser. Once you tell it to temporarily allow pop-ups, the new window opens. If narrowcasters are willing to pay extra for Narrowcast's nBed option, they can have the Player window embedded in their Web page to avoid this less-than-ideal viewer experience.

The Player window typically includes a video frame with Play/Pause, Fast Forward, Rewind and Volume controls, a live program guide showing the current, recent past, and future programming, plus conventional Web links. Past programs on the guide are available as video on demand items. The most sophisticated channels also let you do keyword searches for programming. The Player window carries the narrowcaster's branding, and Narrowstep will customize the look and feel for each customer.

The Narrowstep video experience isn't miles better than at other streaming video sites, but it is consistently good. As Beaumont says, "Streaming video across the internet is now a relatively straightforward process. A lot of people can do that part." The trick is that the Narrowstep platform can support long-form video, not just the short clips that have made YouTube and other sites so popular. Long-form video includes continuous, around-the-clock streaming that allows narrowcasters to emulate conventional or "linear" TV, as Beaumont calls it.

Video quality may be good, but in my experience, it's nothing like broadcast quality. The Narrowstep technology automatically measures the viewer's connection speed and sends the best-quality stream the connection can handle. Streams range from 56 Kbps to 1.8 Mbps. The assessment of connection capacity appears accurate. In all my viewing of Narrowcast channels, only one stream on one occasion stopped and required rebuffering.

Beaumont says that in the UK, most new residential broadband connections are now 8 Mbps and they can support the Narrowcast 1.8 Mbps streams, which he claims are comparable to broadcast TV. On my cable modem service, I watched at 400 Kbps, which is probably more typical, at least in North America.

Video in the normal video window, which on my 19-inch 1280x1024 monitor measures about 3 inches x 2.5 inches, looks crisp. Motion is generally smooth and audio is pretty well synched with video. Most streams are remarkably free of motion artifacts, the blurring around the edges of objects and sometimes horizontal lines that appear in video streams with fast motion. One or two channels did on occasion show extreme motion artifacts, however.

When you choose full-screen mode, the video quality naturally degrades. Motion remains fairly smooth and audio and video are still in synch, but pixilation and motion artifacts become much more noticeable. At best, it's comparable to a poor VHS recording, at worst, it's virtually unwatchable.

Yet despite the occasionally dodgy video quality and/or tiny video windows, people watch this stuff. Narrowstep streams 7.5 million videos a month, generates nearly a million clicks a day and is approaching a million viewers per month. More surprising is that they watch for a long time. "When I joined Narrowstep a year ago," Beaumont says, "the average viewer watched for about 20 minutes at a time. It's closer now to an hour and a half."

That increase in viewing time is partly a result of the Narrowstep product getting better, he says. And part of it is that content has generally improved. "What I say to everybody is, 'Look, if you haven't got good-quality content, don't bother.' Content is, and I believe will remain, king."

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