skinkers_sm

 

Wow, you do a short Partner-TV video and the world goes mad!! The guys at Skinkers are no doubt excited about the coverage being generated around LiveStation over the last 24 hours but some folks like ArsTechnica and Ryan Stewart at ZDNet got the wrong end of the stick whereas Michael Arrington at Techcrunch got it spot on. How do I know this? Well I shot the video :)

So, just to be clear:

  • Livestation IS built on Silverlight and is very cool stuff
  • Livestation is NOT a Microsoft product
  • Microsoft has a small stake in Skinkers. We don't own them or their technology!

 

Jari from Skinkers set the record straight on my blog with this

1. While Microsoft has a minority stake in Skinkers (the company developing LiveStation), this project is very much our own initiative. We are developing the platform on technology originally developed by Microsoft Research in Cambridge but now it's fair to say that we are going forward with our own engineers (with the occasional phone-call to the MS researchers for hard-to-find answers!).

2. Unlike what some people are saying, we are definitely NOT TAKING ON Joost! We love Joost and think it's a great idea, but we are trying to do something different and complementary: we are trying to get live television on the computer. We believe that the user experience with streaming so far has never been really good enough. We hope to move the user experience a step forward and maybe to the point where people will look at LiveStation and think "Wow, I can ACTUALLY watch this and keep it on my computer".

Thanks again for the support and interest but please don't go around shouting "Microsoft is taking on Joost". The correct slogan should be "Skinkers is trying to get TV working on the computer!" and I can assure you, it is fun but very hard!

All the best.

LiveStation team

 

Wanna know more? Watch the full interview and demo below

LiveStation Demo
Interview with Matteo Berlucchi from Skinkers