My Wuw!!!!

Despite all the hype created around how the likes of Ustream, Joost and Kyte are promising to change television programming as we know it, for quite a while, I have found these services quite uninteresting, the quality of content not quite to my taste. This all changed when I wanted to watch the 20 - 20 world cup cricket final between Pakistan and India. The match was available only on pay-per-view on dish network. Even though I was willing to pay the utterly high price for the service and the one year contract that goes with it, the dish company could not provide me the service because of the unfavorable direction in which the balcony of my apartment faced!!!

Not willing to give up cheering for my team in the finals, I searched Yahoo answers to find out if I could watch the match online. I was very happy to find out that some kind soul was broadcasting the match live on ustream. Now only if this service worked flawlessly!! I had to try for over 45 minutes, literally speaking, to connect to the match stream. Once connected the quality of video was jittery for sometime and then it stabilized. The audio quality was acceptable and had no jitters. Thanks to ustream, I was able to watch the world cup final, including the presentation ceremony.

Will I use services like Ustream again? Probably yes, because I know they do have programming catering to audience, considered too niche by mainstream media companies. Here is my wishlist for ustream.

- Please make the experience more pleasant. Waiting for 45 minutes to connect to your favorite program leaves bitter taste.

- Please, please, please do something about the video quality. Just try watching a popular sports match yourself and you will know what I am talking about. The video quality is utterly jittery, not to mention the low resolution and other artefacts.

- Please do something about irrelevant advertising on your channels. What’s the point in showing advertisements created for UK businesses to audience in US.

- Please, please, please provide more programming for cricket, field hockey and international languages.

I am sure you can charge premium as high as the pay-per-view channels in regular television, if you can guarantee the same quality of video and seamless experience. I am pretty serious about it. The mainstream media is not serious about catering to fans of field hockey, cricket or programming created in other languages. The audience interested in this kind of programming has the means and the will to pay for it, if a company were to offer it. The long tail for the market interested in non-mainstream programming is bigger than the long tail of advertisers being catered to by the Google’s and Yahoo’s of the world.

I am pretty confident that the company that caters to this non-mainstream TV audience will grow to be as big as Google or Microsoft, I guarantee it!!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 5:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.