The Coming: Online TV

FRANCE: "Are you ready?" was the message from the world's first TV-quality online TV network, delivered at this week's MIPCOM audiovisual trade show.

The network, Joost, launched this month just ahead of a clutch of competitors that include Italy's Babelgum, offers legal rather than pirated entertainment for free, but raises new questions about what this will mean for the massive TV business.

"The Internet will start off showing traditional entertainment but eventually users and content creators will use the capabilities of the Internet to create some amazing entertainment," said Mike Volpi, who heads up Joost.

Many mighty Internet operators, such as AOL, MSN and Yahoo are investing heavily in making their own TV shows.

Media giant News Corp has spent a fortune buying into massively popular Internet social networking site MySpace, and has launched MySpace TV, which will be available in over 12 countries.

And telecommunications companies around the world are investing in IPTV television packages packed with satellite TV shows, as well as video-on-demand that customers can watch on their sitting room TV sets, and pay for in their telephone bill.

The TV and digital media industries are right to be concerned, experts said at MIPCOM this week, as no one really knows how the current explosion of new ways to watch and interact with television will evolve.

But everyone remembers how the Internet quickly changed everyone's lives. Volpi said over two million users had already downloaded the Joost application needed to use the fledgling TV service, which has been recording more than 100,000 downloads a day since it started on October 1.

But "it's early days," Volpi cautioned, adding that the length of time users were staying on the channel varied enormously from region to region -- though it was upwards of 20 minutes.

In the US, TV fans were opting for comedy and sci-fi, while in Latin America, and Brazil in particular, music videos were tops. Europeans were going for full-length feature films. Volpi said Joost aimed to remain a free service funded by advertisements and hoped to attract more creative, interactive ads.

As to content, he said users could look forward in the future to big-branded TV series as well as a vast library of older TV shows along with the mass of user-generated content on services like YouTube.

Cannes, Sunday, AFP