Seesaw's online TV service has launched in full for British internet users after less than a month of beta testing on 20,000 users.



The service offers viewers the chance to catch up for free on 3,000 hours of archive and recent programmes from the BBC, Channel 4 and Five.



Seesaw is funded by advertising - viewers see unskippable 60-second ad breaks before and during each show.



Seventeen brands including Ikea, Diageo and Kraft have already signed up.



Channel 4 and Five are selling space around their own programmes, with an agency booking advertising content around shows from the BBC and other independent production companies.



Seesaw was born from technology bought by Arqiva from the aborted Project Kangaroo, an internet TV service supported by several UK broadcasters that was blocked by the Competition Commission.



Seesaw's platform controller, John Keeling, told BBC News that the site would roll out a premium service in the next few months with 2000 additional hours of programmes.



Customers of the new service will make undisclosed micropayments to view or "rent" major shows.



The company is still in negotiation with several US studios for their content, although the website will not be available overseas.



There are plans to "experiment" offering 90 minute TV movies but SeeSaw will not stream cinema release films.



Viewers choosing to rent a programme will have 48 hours to stream it without ads or return to it to watch again, explained Mr Keeling.



The BBC iPlayer offers viewers the chance to download and own programmes for 30 days but Seesaw's user testing indicated that its customers would rather stream video, he added.



Streaming site



He denied that Seesaw was following in the footsteps of online music service Spotify.



"I can see the comparison but Spotify is more of a free and subscription hybrid - we're looking at free and transactional pay-per-view hybrid."



Chief Executive Pierre-Jean Sebart said that a subscription package was something SeeSaw was "investigating".



While the service will initially be purely a streaming outlet, there are plans to add social networking elements to the Seesaw site, said head of product and technology Richard Dines, who previously worked on Project Kangaroo.



Both Mr Dines and Mr Keeling were reluctant to make comparisons between the two initiatives.



"It's a different story," said Mr Keeling. "Lessons were learned by the shareholders of Kangaroo. We have a different model - we don't have broadcasters as shareholders."



However he credited the catch-up services developed individually by the major broadcasters - such as 4OD, the BBC iPlayer and Demand Five - for opening up a market for internet TV.



“ You need a big player to change the way people watch television ”

John Keeling, Seesaw



"You need a big player to change the way people watch television," he said.



But with broadcasters already pointing viewers to their own services, the challenge for Seesaw and similar companies such as Blinkbox is to divert enough users away, said Chris Curtis, news editor at industry publication Broadcast.



"The difficulty for all these guys is getting enough viewers to site to view the content to make the advertising model stack up," he said.



"It's quite hard to get people to pay for content online. They might be prepared to make micropayments for the really big American shows but people generally associate conventional, standard TV with being free at point of viewing."



Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/8518713.stm



Published: 2010/02/17 11:48:35 GMT



© BBC MMX
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By Maggie Shiels

Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley



A leading privacy group has urged US regulators to investigate Google's new social networking service Buzz, one week after its launch.



The Electronic Privacy Information Centre (Epic) has made its complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC)



It says that Buzz - which is part of Google's Gmail service - is "deceptive" and breaks consumer protection law.



The search giant has twice made changes to the service to placate an outcry from users about privacy concerns.



Canadian officials are also looking at whether Buzz violates privacy laws.



"Google still hasn't gone far enough," Epic's consumer privacy counsel Kim Nguyen told BBC News.



"Twitter is a social networking site and people know what they are signing up for. With Gmail, users signed up for an e-mail service not a social networking service," said Ms Nguyen.



"Despite all the changes, they still do not give users a meaningful way to opt into it."



Buzz was automatically rolled out to Gmail's 176 million users.



The FTC has been asked to "require Google to provide Gmail users with opt-in consent to the Google Buzz service".



The complaint has also asked the FTC to "require Google to provide notice to and request consent from Gmail users before making material changes to their privacy policy in future, and seek appropriate injunctive and compensatory relief".



'Rightfully upset'



Since launching Google Buzz as part of Gmail last week, the search giant has faced a torrent of criticism regarding privacy.



The feature that attracted the biggest outcry was one which automatically gave users a ready-made circle of friends to follow based on the people they emailed the most.



Privacy advocates said that meant the list of contacts was open for all to see and could have had serious implications for journalists, businesses or even those conducting illicit affairs.



Engineers have now replaced the auto-follow feature with one that suggests who to follow but EPIC said that still leaves the "user with the burden to block those unwanted followers".



The organisation also wants the company barred from using Gmail address book contacts to make up social networking lists.



Google has apologised and said it acted quickly to address concerns including introducing a new option to disable the service.



"If it becomes clear that people don't think we've done enough, we'll make more changes," Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Buzz told BBC News.



He acknowledged that many of Gmail's "tens of millions" of users were "rightfully upset" and that the firm was "very, very sorry".



'Seek forgiveness'



The botched launch of Buzz has led many to ponder how and why it happened.



In an interview with BBC News, Mr Jackson admitted that testing of the service had been inadequate and that it was not opened up to a big enough group of people to try out.



"We've been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn't quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild."



The Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group, said it was not surprised by this stumble.



"This case illustrates a lot about Google's corporate culture where a company is run by computer scientists whose operating method is don't ask for permission when you can always ask for forgiveness," said the organisation's John Simpson.



The move by EPIC to ask the FTC to investigate Buzz mirrors one it made in December against the world's biggest social networking platform Facebook.



Then, the privacy watchdog was not happy about changes the company made to its privacy settings.



Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/8519314.stm



Published: 2010/02/17 08:47:02 GMT



© BBC MMX
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