MUMBAI: To date, television on the Internet hasn‘t been like television at all; video streams tend to skip, stutter and break, image quality is low, and very little content is live. That‘s about to change.

Making its worldwide debut at Streaming Media East in New York City, Zattoo has unveiled a new peer-to-peer IPTV service that makes live, quick-start, long-play Internet Television a reality for broadband users, broadcasters, content owners and advertisers.

The first Zattoo P2P IPTV broadcasts begin in Switzerland with the availability of every action-packed minute of the 2006 soccer world championship (known globally as the FIFA World Cup(TM)), streamed live to Swiss viewers starting with the first match in June and culminating with the championship match on 9 July 2006, states an official release.

"Advances in broadband, video compression, and multicast streaming technology are rapidly lowering the technical hurdles for Internet and television to merge on a PC. However, there is still the matter of cost. Our streaming network solves that problem by reducing broadcasters‘ costs by a factor of ten, making it compelling for them to switch to our technology and broaden their service offering," says CTO and co-founder of Zattoo Sugih Jamin. "Also, Zattoo‘s proprietary P2P streaming technology ensures a video delivery and smoothness that has until now been impossible to achieve."

Developed by researchers and software engineers from University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Zattoo offers a DRM-secure, commercial peer-to-peer network optimized for streaming video that is uniquely capable of serving the needs of consumers, broadcasters, content owners and advertisers, adds the release.

"End users are tired of islands of content. They want a single place to go where they can switch channels as easily as pressing channel up and down on their current TV remote," says CEO and co-founder of Zattoo Beat Knecht. "Zattoo offers such a single point of access to the widest variety of content, delivered with the highest possible quality and reliability. Users may watch news at work, educational programs at school, or movies in the privacy of their room, all without set top box, as long as they have broadband access."