Why Internet-TV

Although Internet-TV outranges mainstream television by far, mainstream television over traditional broadcast networks has still advantage over Internet-TV with regard to user acceptance, installed base of appropriate equipment, existing infrastructures, coverage, and bandwidth cost. However, the variety of content disposable is growing tremendously. Beating transmission cost of common broadcast technologies by length Internet-TV becomes the alternative for new content distribution models. But, in most cases Internet-TV occurs rather complementary than competitive to mainstream television. It can offer a low cost entry for content owners, grow with the audience, and in some cases expand in terms of feeding into common television broadcast networks even.

Niche content and special interest

More and more owners of content understand the chance of rich media presentation to a broad audience. But for most of them their broad audience is still not big enough to afford the cost of satellite broadcast. For such content owners Internet-TV appears to be a very attractive and affordable solution to spread out high quality content.
Initiators and drivers very often are print media companies and/or associations as in following examples:

Some of these channels might be tied to national culture or language, but there are others profiting from an international TV program.

Content re-publishing

Broadcasters own a lot of content. They start to perceive IP TV as a chance for content re-publishing. Typical examples could be:

Socio-demographic TV

This is a very specific application of niche content. But again, in many cases foreign populations are too small to make TV broadcast profitable. The big benefit lies in the coverage the platform can provide outside the footprint of a national broadcaster. With the targeted growth of the GRID-TV network this coverage becomes more and more valuable for the respective content provider. Clearly the socio-demographic TV is an international service.

Corporate TV

In particular large enterprises are highly interested to keep their employees informed about everything going on in the company. And, in some industries, they have a similar high interest to address their customers. A proof for the above are investments in satellite broadcast by a number of companies such as Daimler Chrysler for internal use, Deutsche Bahn for customer attraction.
But not all companies are ready or willing to afford satellite broadcast, so that again Internet-TV is the alternative they start to look at whether it would be for internal use only, for customer relationship or a combination of both.
Another group would not necessarily consist of large enterprises but is counted here, since the business model seems to be similar: associations and (public) organizations. One typical example could be the tourism industry where you find a lot of smaller players such as townships, regions, associations, or special tour agencies all addressing the same target group. An independent cross network/border Internet-TV network would be the ideal platform for a travel channel provider who aggregates the content from the interest group mentioned above. The German company Reise-TV GmbH (Reise being the German word for travel) started this business already and the response is tremendous.

Some examples show the range for “corporate” Internet-TV:

POS

Flatscreen monitors start to replace posters or audio transmissions at points of sale. Rich media again is regarded as a major improvement for advertising and customer care. Internet-TV is an ideal way to operate POS television. Such application would rather be operated in an offline mode. Content is downloaded to the hard disk of a PC or a receiver device at the POS together with program schedules created once for all locations. The POS station automatically displays content according the schedule delivered. Newsworthy information can be integrated contemporary. The POS application profits from the ubiquitous and redundant network.