New products and services for bringing television to the Internet are appearing every day.  This week's new entries include two with very similar sounding names -- Vudu and Zattoo.  The former is a Silicon Valley startup building a box very similar to the Apple TV but driven by a peer-to-peer network.  Vudu has reportedly cut distribution deals with all the major movie studios with the exception of Fox (by far the most technically conservative company) and will be offering primarily movies when it launches later this year.  Notice I didn't say "movie downloads," because what Vudu does certainly includes the distribution of digital content, but it isn't in a strict sense "downloading" since the end-user doesn't come away with a true copy of the movie unless they point a camcorder at the TV screen.  This is the feature that evidently appealed to the studios.

Vudu, led by the very impressive Alain Rossmann (who did most of the actual work of Apple Evangelism in the early Macintosh days when Guy Kawasaki was getting all the press) sells a closed box that connects to  a television, not a PC, and is therefore supposed to be more secure.  The only things that appear to be missing from the product are live programming  and true HD content (the box apparently uses line-doubling techniques to scale SD content up to HD resolutions), which isn't as good as real HD.

But the most impressive aspect of Vudu isn't the box, itself, but the fact that the company managed to raise $21 million and spend two years in development yet hardly anyone (including Microsoft and me) had heard of it until this past weekend.  How do you do five movie studio deals without anyone noticing?

Zattoo, on the other hand is a service, not a product, and appears to be like NeoKast -- a peer-to-peer distribution system offering live content and promising publishers a 10-fold improvement in bandwidth utilization.  The service is presently available only in Switzerland, Denmark, and shortly in the UK, but is planned for a global roll-out.  Here is an early look at Zattoo from a Swiss nerd who has been playing with the service:

"Firstly, the don't have, nor have they indicated any plans to create a publisher client. So, all streams are generated by Zattoo. This limits their ability to serve large numbers of smaller broadcasters.  It is doubtful that you'll distribute your webcam through Zattoo. Secondly, their protocol efficiency is in question. Although I ran tests on their client with several users I noticed little to no sharing. This means that they are not significantly more cost-effective or scalable than other CDN-based solutions. Thirdly, there are some questions about their latency. They claim it is very low and they stream live, but simultaneous tests indicated significantly different delivery times. This means that packets delivered at time X to one user are delivered at time X+Y to another user, where Y is substantial (even up to 20 seconds). This unpredictability indicates their protocol does not respond efficiently in real-time to current network conditions."

Yeah, well it IS beta code, so what do you expect?

Whatever its efficiencies, Zattoo is shaking-up the market everywhere it has so far appeared.

Of course the big boost to TV over the Internet will reportedly come when Joost, from the founders of Kazaa and Skype, leaves beta and becomes broadly available.  The company has lined up an impressive list of broadcast partners.  Based on the same p2p code as Kazaa and Skype, I have no doubt that it will work, but the question yet to be answered about Joost is how much damage will it do in the process of working.  Skype, for example, is a notorious abuser of bandwidth privileges.  Joost is supposed to be better than Skype in this regard, but Joost and Skype have the same p2p code base.  These facts are inconsistent, and with the vastly larger bandwidth footprint of one-to-many video versus one-to-one audio, the impact of Joost is likely to be 10-100 times as great as Skype.  It should be interesting.....