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Zattoo – news from the field

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Zattoo – news from the field

By CoCaman

Zattoo Logo Zattoo is a (semi Swiss, semi US) startup providing a free IPTV service for Swiss users. Other than “The Venice Project” Zattoo really streams Live-TV. The quality is not as clear as you know from other IPTV services, I think that is a bandwith issue on their site (the quality makes not difference if you are connected on a 3.5 MBit or a 100 MBit/s connection). And for my Apple friends out there: Yes, there is a Mac client.
Currently they offer the following channels for free viewing:

  1. ARD
  2. arte
  3. BBC World
  4. CNN International
  5. EuroNews
  6. EuroSport
  7. ORF 1
  8. Pro 7
  9. RTL
  10. Sat 1
  11. SF 1
  12. SF zwei
  13. SF info
  14. Star TV
  15. TSI 1
  16. TSI 2
  17. TSR 1
  18. TSR 2
  19. TVE International
  20. Viva
  21. VOX
  22. ZDF

Pretty cool and good list. But I would love to see Germany’s n-tv, SuperRTL (yes, because of SpongeBob Squarepants), ZDF Info- & Dokukanal and a few others (here is the “coming soon list“).

zattoo_school_net.jpgToday I tried their client at my school. I did that before for The Venice Project, Gaim, Skype and other software. None of them worked. Surprisly Zattoo does. During the hour long lunch time I can now watch any of the above channels. That is pretty cool 🙂
I also noticed an error message on the “ORF 1” channel. The same message I get on my satellite receiver for any channel that is decrypted and I can not see. My conclusion now is, that the Zattoo server streams a satellite signal to the Internet. And are they actually paying for the proxying the TV? If anybody knows something, please let me know, I wouldn’t be to surprise if they don’t.

2 thoughts on “Zattoo – news from the field”

  1. Zattoo does have a license for broadcasting TV over the net in Switzerland, and this license includes ORF1. Zattoo is not available globally (yet).

  2. Hi there,

    I’m Beat, CEO of Zattoo. Which ISP do you use? We’d like to track differences in quality between different ISPs, because there are indeed significant differences between Cablecom and other ISPs, for example. We’ll then be able to work with these providers to negotiate and improve quality. Since we’re not buffering much at all, any major glitch at the ISP level will show up on your screen in the form of lost data. So, please send your observations to us. Regards, Beat

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