Hi everyone

I work for a media company based in Mallorca serving the British expat community.

We are in the process of establishing a data centre in the UK that will stream live UK television programming via the internet.

It will be a professional product, set up to stream high quality TV direct to television sets via a set-top box with a conventional remote control.

This differs substantially from what I have been shown is out there. Cost is expected to be around £75 per month, and recording facilities will be available to compensate for time zone differences.

I am interested at this stage in any feedback I can gather, either from prospective users of the service or from anyone interested in becoming an agent in their respective expat community and actively marketing the service for us.

I welcome all replies and questions.

Regards

Andy

Seems way too expensive to me especially given the unreliability and slowness of the internet in many areas. Also I believe, thought I don't have it, that SKY in Italy has a lot of UK programing.

There's something called a "sling box" which works in the US, I don't know if it would work in the UK. The initial set-up costs under $200, but you can stream US cable or satellite TV and record it too if you are willing to pay the additional $18 per month that costs. Of course it presupposes you have a "home" in the States (a relative wiling to share their TV service from a spare connection) with you. If it works in the UK it would be your competition.

Hi Diane

We're aware of the slingbox and actually use them as part of our solution, they work extremely well.

The cost issue, however, is in getting the stream from the slingbox up to the high speed internet backbone (Tier 1). Most broadband connections have an upload speed of only 256 kbps, and this may be shared with up to 50 other users on your local exchange.

Picture quality accordingly is poor.

Our solution has to cost what it does because we buy a dedicated connection direct to the internet backbone and dedicate 3-4 mbps to each account.

These connections cost in the region of £100,000 a year, hence the equivalent cost of £75/month for the service.

More information about bandwidth and contention ratios are on our website at www.medsol.biz, and I hope I have explained the service clearly enough.

As I said in my original post, at this stage I'm particularly interested in gathering feedback on the concept.

I know there will be many people that tell me the point of moving abroad is to get away from UK TV, and that the cost proposed is way too high, etc, etc.

But equally this will always be a niche product, it is not intended for a mass market and in fact we can probably only accommodate 1,000 subscribers in the foreseeable future at most.

It is a service that has been developed in accordance with customers' requests; to provide a service of sufficient quality that can be viewed on a normal TV and controlled with a remote control.

Nobody wanted a solution which entailed viewing the stream on a PC.

Thanks for your interest.

Regards