Wait, Why Exactly Am I Writing About Zillion TV? – Opinion: 15,000 video options and there’s nothing on…

4 Mar 2009

A new company by the name of Zillion TV is making headlines today, after the company unveiled its upcoming new set-top broadband video service to select media outlets. Yeah, we were as bored writing that first sentence as you were reading it. It’s not exactly clear why they’re making headlines, aside from the fact the company is studio-backed and apparently taking a page out of the ESPN360 playbook. In other words, only making the service available from select ISPs. Judging from the CEO’s comments to Wired, it’s pretty clear Zillion’s hoping that by partnering with ISPs, they can get some preferred treatment from their network throttling hardware:

“A couple of weeks ago, the Cox cable company put out an announcement regarding the matrix by which they’re going to deal with those situations where their pipes are clogged,” said Berman. “It was a priority matrix of what they’re going to do, and who they’re going to help first. The first ones they say they’re going to help are streaming, which is what we do. The peer-to-peer guys, and the folks doing progressive normal web streaming, and the folks doing downloading are the last on the list — they’re not going to get any help at all.”

The problem being that for one, carriers aren’t going to want middlemen standing between themselves and their Internet video ad revenue, so they’ll prefer doing this themselves — probably badly. Assuming Zillion did get preferential treatment from ISPs, they’d risk annoying the network neutrality brigades under a new FCC boss who’s pro network neutrality. Finally, there’s already a flood of established broadband video options, and this service seemingly brings nothing new to the table, and isn’t coming out until the end of the year anyway.

If the company is half as good at broadband video as they are at getting tech journalists and bloggers to blather on about a seemingly irrelevant and largely uninteresting product (like we just did), they might just have something.
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