Livestation and the Unseemly Rush of the A Listers to bury Joost

Those nice people from Skinkers (just up the road here in London) have collaborated with Microsoft to build a peer 2 peer approach to getting live TV media onto a PC without a translating black box - Livestation. It uses Microsoft's Silverlight technology (and no doubt quite a bit more) to try and give a zero buffering, on the fly TV experience on the PC*.

Microsoft's, Steve "Blue Monster" Clayton has blogged it here, complete with video

Interesting approach, our experience is that it its darn hard to do this on-client without mediating appliance-ware or without something happening real time on the server side, so we assume the broadcasters will have to transform their output for this in some form or another.

* we've already applied to be on the beta test of course, to fire it up on our MyPCTV rig

Is it a Joost killer - well, insofar as it streams TV direct to the PC it is, but there is no VOD element - so its more a "compete for the attention time" and thats where it potentially is a killer as it looks like there are far fewer moving parts to get right. As many other people have pointed out, Joost is its own Joost killer as its a walled garden selling stuff one can get elsewhere.

But thats just business as usual...

No, the really good story here is that a host of US based A List tech bloggers apparently were tripping over each other in the wee hours of the morning to announce this as the Joost killer, and have thus got lots of things wrong in their stories, and there is now much huffing and puffing going on to climb back onto the Blog Tower's High Ground.

It would appear therefore (reading Mr Scoble's recent missives for example) that the space for breaking news is getting more competitive for the A-Listers as various newer, brighter, shinier - and better informed? - commentators appear. We await with interest the denouncing of blogging as old hat by various A Listers as they flounce off to pastures anew, like Facebook.....

Postscript...in fact, it would appear there is such a Gaping Void emerging between what the A Listers desire and what We, the Virtual People want that a Declaration of Independence has been mooted.

Hide the tea.......