Monday, March 31, 2008

Joost Experimenting With New Video Streaming Technologies For March Madness


Joost, the online television service, is using this weekend's March Madness US college basketball games to test a live streaming technology that it hopes will reduce the financial and technical burdens of broadcasting popular events online. CBS, which has the broadcast rights to the NCAA event and has seen huge traffic to its own web coverage of March Madness in previous years, has joined forces with Joost for the trial. Matt Zelesko, Joost's head of engineering, said its peer-to-peer technology, which distributes the burden of serving video among users' own computers, could significantly lower the cost of handling heavy online traffic for live events. "In future, this could cut millions of dollars of bandwidth costs for them for this two to three week period," Vipin Goyal, Joost's project manager for the live March Madness test, claimed. Joost was in discussions with music companies, he added, over the possible use of the technology to air live concerts, which have hitherto been uneconomic for traditional broadcasters.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/712dbace-fd33-11dc-961e-000077b07658.html

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