Recent Posts

Subscribe by Email

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Archives

Topics



Blog Analytics

« Tittle Tattle | Main | Make time for this »


Babelgum

By jpenston | June 11, 2007 | Print This Post Print This Post

I have written a lot about Joost. Now it’s Babelgum’s turn to go under the microscope, following its announcement last week that the beta test period is now officially open to all.

I won’t waste your time rehashing the Babelgum story. You can find a good description here and here. Instead, I will waste your time giving you my view of the service and particularly how it compares to Joost.

My first impression of Babelgum was, unfortunately for them, of poor picture quality. One of the first segments I watched was “Get Outta Town: Sydney”, think Lonely-Planet TV and you will be close enough. The presenter, Joseph Motiki, talked so quickly that you literally couldn’t see his lips move.

This was common throughout and destroys the experience. Have a look at the screen capture below. It is from David Beckham’s greatest goals when he scored from the half-way line and made his name. They also have Maradona’s amongst others, including the Hand of God moment. Don’t think for a second that you will be able to see what the referee and the rest of the world missed in 1986. In fact the picture quality on Babelgum is probably worse than it was on TV 20 years ago when the pictures came back from Mexico via satellite.

I have had to reduce the capture size by 3x to fit it here, but even that doesn’t hide the blockiness of the images. No, this isn’t one of those spot-the-ball competitions. It’s there, somewhere. And the goalkeeper really does have two legs, even if one of them is completely indiscernible from the ad-hoardings.

My traces seem to indicate that Babelgum bandwidth usage is slightly lower at around 600-650kbps than Joost’s 700kbps. While the bandwidth on all services will undoubtedly be cranked up improving resolution as time goes by, it is interesting to note that Babelgum packets arrive as TCP. Joost packets are UDP. Babelgum’s traffic profile is very spiky (see first chart below), while Joost is much less so. As an aside, you can see in the Joost chart the higher bandwidth used by ads (initial profile) compared to media (second slice).

Babelgum

Joost

There is really very little going on in the way of P2P on the Babelgum service. It is built in, but it needs the network to be seeded. The same was true of Joost when I took the above sample on 3rd April, although their peer hit ratios were better six weeks later when I went back to look at them again. I’ll give Babelgum a chance here and reassess this point in a month or so.

In terms of content quality, there is more choice on Joost. Sometimes more is less and this might be a case here. The programming on Joost is very yoof - very hip. Just not very watchable unless you like burps, farts or loud music. The Babelgum archive has some interesting stuff that I have actually watched… Like the Turtle Treaty piece on how the inhabitants of remote islands revere, and yet end up eating, the turtles that they share their lives with. Not what I expected, but welcome nonetheless.

Another area in which Babelgum seems to have the edge is in the realisation that this is TV as well as Video, and that there is a difference between the two. There is clearly the broadcast angle built into Babelgum - look at the AP news channel for example.

The Babelgum interface is really clean and I think that also works better than Joost at the moment. I think maybe though the Joost one is more scalable somehow as the Babelgum GUI might restrict the number of channels you can track due to the amount of info on each channel that they carry.

There is also a different business approach. The Babelgum one is open, almost to a fault, describing the revenue share on ads up front for example. It seems like they are going to go straight for the second tier of no-name producers and give them an indie-platform. Joost are much more into the “household names” by the looks of things.

So which one wins? I would have to say that I prefer Babelgum, but that I think that Joost will win long term. The niche that Babelgum seems to inhabit with its programming and navigation is nice but that is an area that Joost can fix probably easier than anything else. Where Joost has the upper hand is in its impetus which is taking the company into the offices of the very biggest names in the industry. Joost is not really a service yet, it’s a vision. It will either be successful breaking the status quo or it will be acquired to make sure that it does not.

Babelgum just does not seem like it can emerge (out of Italy) and break into the “not-invented-here” markets. Joost is making a big play for the US because it understands that the US is a thought leader and standards setter in the internet space. In the end, this is where I think both are heading - into the position as “the operating system” for internet video. Here they take on YouTube amongst others… Is there room for multiple O/Ss?

Copyright The IP Development Network - www.ipdev.net
Phone +44 1763 81 00 20
Email jpenston@ipdev.net

Share This


Topics: Babelgum, Joost, video on demand |

Comments