Live Internet Television

Orange Africa Cup of Nations

ivi, Inc. with its channel partner Africast, is carrying all the final matches of the Orange Africa Cup of Nations live online through the downloadable ivi TV player. There is a free promotional period of the preliminary round matches Jan 10th through the 23rd, where some matches will be rerun. The real fun starts when the finals start on Jan 24th, where ivi is offering 1/4 Finals, 1/2 Finals, 3rd Place, and the Final match for Pay-Per-View of the COCAN sponsored events. This marks the first time that viewers can watch live football from Africa to the world on the Internet.

Viewers will be able to choose per day bundles, or pay to watch the entire finals according to the live CAN Angola airing times:

PPV Events:

Orange Africa Cup Playoffs Complete Package LIVE – All Matches

Starting Jan 24, 2010 (16:00 UTC) – Jan 31, 2010

Orange Africa Cup Quarter Finals LIVE Jan 24, 2010

Angola v. Ghana (16:00 UTC)
Cote d’Ivoire v. Algeria (19:30 UTC)

Orange Africa Cup Quarter Finals LIVE Jan 25, 2010

Egypt v. Cameroon (16:00 UTC)
Zambia v. Nigeria (19:30 UTC)

Orange Africa Cup Semi Finals LIVE Jan 28, 2010

Winner 25 v. Winner 28 (16:00 UTC)
Winner 26 v. Winner 27 (19:30 UTC)

Orange Africa Cup Third Place Game LIVE Jan 30, 2010

Loser 29 v. Loser 30 (16:00 UTC)

Orange Africa Cup Final LIVE Jan 31, 2010

Winner 29 v. Winner 30 (16:00 UTC)

As people discovered in ‘08 with the Beijing Olympics, it can be hard to watch what you want live online, even if it’s heavily promoted as being “live online.” To protect its TV ad revenue by keeping viewership up, NBC made sure that a lot of its live online content was not available to US customers (Silicon Alley Insider).

With the upcoming Vancouver Olympics, NBC is trying something a little different (Media Daily News):

The system, tabbed “Olympics Online Connect,” allows people to prove via an authentication process that they pay a provider for TV service. That measure opens the gate to more than 1,000 hours of live Olympic streaming and full-event replays.

“TV Everywhere” is a concept designed to prevent customers from dropping their pay TV service if the same content is available online gratis.

This is exactly the kind of mindset — in effect, keeping people from accessing the content they want by making it too expensive in a bundle — that ivi seeks to make obsolete.

ivi delivers live TV to your desktop, with a fully integrated channel guide.

Want to be among the first to experience the first true live Internet TV?

Download the promo-version of the free ivi player we put together for NewTeeVee Live.

We hope you’ll also post any comments you have on the experience.

DRM is broken.

Artificially impeding the ability to share digital content makes as much sense as attempting to keep people from reading used books. Content owners should quit trying to keep people from distributing content at their own cost. Ask any content owner: They would love to have free distribution. Provided, of course, that they can monetize their content.

Copyright owners have been improperly taken down a rabbit hole by technology companies promising to protect their content the wrong way. DRM restricts the user experience which, in turn, drives users to seek pirated or illegally distributed DRM-free content.

Once we agree that DRM is not a viable solution, we’re free to look at the problem through a different lens.

First, let’s state the goal. Content owners want to control the use of their content. Usually, this means they want to be paid for it.

Second, lets discuss how we achieve it. How do we allow people to easily view and distribute content, while ensuring that content owners can control and monetize the use of that content?

Enter ivi’s Streaming Block Encryption, the right way to protect copyright.

Here is the approach:

1) Allow peer sharing

a) Shift distribution cost to consumer
b) Encourage word-of-mouth promotion

2) Support individual subscription, ppv, and rental models

a) Assign an individualized, trackable identification to each player
b) Track content and time based access for each player

3) Make it easy for the consumer

a) Users are able to say the following: “I’ve paid for it, I can view it.”
b) And “I can share it with others, as long as they’ve paid for it.”

ivi’s proprietary protection system encodes and encrypts content into the .ivi format. This format is only viewable on ivi TV, a live TV player application that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Every ivi TV player is uniquely identified and is programmed to securely pull rapidly rotating decoding keys from the ivi trackers over SSL, then decrypt and decode the content to each individual viewer’s screen.

The .ivi format is encrypted data, viewable only in the ivi TV player, so it can be shared, duplicated, and distributed. However, the shared .ivi files are only viewable on ivi TV. Therefore, the ivi TV player will only allow the shared content to be viewed if it is designated as “free” or if the subsequent viewer has paid for access to that particular shared content.

This “downloadable conditional access system” component to the ivi system has elicited the following response from Stephen Dukes, former VP of Technology from TCI Cable: “ivi solved what the cable industry has spent millions of dollars trying to solve.”

Every content owner that uses the ivi system to distribute their channel, content, or programs, gets all this content protection built in. Best of all, the ivi system allows content owners to control and thereby monetize the use of their content online.

ivi is Internet TV done right.

If you put video content online, it’s interesting to look at how viewers vary from site to site. Male vs. female, skewing younger vs. skewing older, each video sharing site has a unique  audience. Read about the Top video sites at the Smart Market blog and Adobe’s Layers Magazine. I think this info is just as important to content creators as it is to advertisers.