What's to stop Commercial broadcasters broadcasting

Had a quick think about this.

What would stop channels like ITV1 and Channel Four broadcasting their channels on the internet? Yes it would cost a lot of money to setup but it also means they can charge a lot more for advertising, or perhaps have a different internet only advertising tarriff.

Is there anything stopping them from doing this? Lets face it OfCom have let them get away with murder so far.

I don't think any of the broadcasters would broadcast on the net even if they wanted to, and i don't think they can.

Firstly they couldn't broadcast imported shows for copyright reasons
Secondly if they broadcast their shows all over the world over the net, it would make it harder for them to sell abroad.
I know everyone hasn't got the net but broadcasters around the world want ratings to justify buying the shows.
Thirdly IMO I don't think advertisers would pay ITV or C4 anymore money cos the multi national companies pay the broadcasters of other countries to advertise on their equivalent to ITV.

I agree that there are probably legal reasons why a TV station cannot be streamed over the internet. Yet Channels Seven and Nine (Australia) are doing just this; showing a feed of all programmes, trailers and ads. I wonder how they got around the legal implications?

Fancy PM-ing me a link or two?

Simon

See this thread Simon. The links are in routemarker's post, about halfway down the page.

I shouldn't think there's any law preventing them from showing their own home made programmes over the net as they would own the worldwide copyright on them. The legal reasons are when they buy programmes from abroad they are contracted to showing them in their country only.
There's nothing stopping ITV showing programmes like Corrie, Emmerdale or This Morning over the Net but no one else would be allowed but I would think it would be a bad move commercially for the company.

Getting a 404 here

Me too at the moment. Just keep trying, it does work sometimes!

I have a feeling that they would be appealing to a niche market if they broadcasted over the internet in the UK. Seriously, who wants to watch a postage stamp sized video on screen with similarly naff audio quality, when you could be sitting in your favourite chair looking at your TV set with reasonable sound/picture quality?

Glancing at the technical aspects of it, it probably would require a bit of planning - the cost of bandwidth and leased lines in the UK is pricey, and with the whole business of the monopolistic dinosaur, BT, introducing a new charging system based on the amount of data transferred, it could pretty much put off those on the capped packages from using the service at all.

Not good news if you're streaming video - you've got no hope in hell of being able to keep within your 1Gb cap if you are on BT Broadband Basic! It'd all be eaten up within 2 days max.

Netherlands ISP "Xs4All" trialled a similar service a few years back streaming BBC World, CCTV (some Chinese channel), Al Jazeera and a few others over their ADSL connections. OK, the picture and sound quality wasn't great but it was watchable, especially as it was during the height of the second Gulf War. But I certainly wouldn't use it as a substitute for watching stuff on normal TV.

lol I dont think the feed has anything to do with seven and ten. I remember i had a link to a direct live CBS feed to the CBS affiliate in Cleveland, Ohio. The link got cut off 2 weeks after i discovered it, sad, i never got to watch primetime.

Hopefully the above link is infact legal so it wont be cut off any time soon.

Interesting actually. Pretty much after I started this topic, i noticed a topic in a magazine about IPTV, which is being developed by Microsoft. This very service might allow this sort of thing to take off with less bandwidth and better quality. Depending on what codecs are available come the time of launching. We already have some great compression codecs. Has anyone seen the new H.264 that Apple are using in Tiger!? It's really good!!