Zattoo

History

Zattoo was created to stream the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany. On 20 April 2007, Zattoo launched in Denmark with ten channels and started piloting in the United Kingdom. On 4 October 2007, Zattoo reached one million registered users in Europe.

Zattoo has been available in Spain since 10 June 2007. On 5 August 2008, Zattoo asked its Spanish users for a €2.40 charge by SMS in order to continue with the service during August and September. In March 2009, Zattoo removed its services from Belgium in an attempt to keep its costs down. Despite this removal of services from Belgium, Zattoo would return if it found a suitable marketing partner. Zattoo is now available in Germany, Spain, Denmark and Switzerland.

In May 2009, lawyers for Universal and Warner Bros. instigated legal proceedings against Zattoo claiming that the Swiss website - which rebroadcasts a number of television stations live online - is adding advertising to films that are shown on German TV via its online service.

On 23 April 2010, Zattoo dropped all the BBC channels from their UK channel list, after ongoing pressure from the BBC to remove them. On 15 June 2010, Zattoo dropped ITV1, Channel 4 and Five from their UK channel list, leaving none of the main UK channels; however, ITV's Northern Ireland (UTV) franchise remain.

Since June 2015, Zattoo Germany integrates an on-demand TV function, which enables viewers to watch a broadcast up to seven days after their TV broadcast in full length. The UEFA Euro 2016 provided Zattoo with a new user record: a total of 1.8 million viewers watched the games on the OTT platform, more than 800,000 of them in Germany. A quarter of the TV consumption during the Euro 2016 through Zattoo took place using TV sets connected to the internet, further narrowing the gap to smartphone/tablet usage (35%) and web usage (40%).

In December 2016, Zattoo reached two million monthly active users. Zattoo has introduced restart functionality for 50 TV channels for its German customers including channels offered by RTL and ProSiebenSat.1. If a user missed the beginning of a show, they can start the show from the beginning. Zattoo is the second platform in Germany that offers this function. Since March 2017, Zattoo offers dynamic advertising insertion to TV broadcasters, allowing advertising content to be cut from the broadcast stream of linear German TV programming and replaced in real time with different content from an advert server.

Devices

Zattoo services are available from a web browser or dedicated applications. The web product functions with any browser that supports Flash. Smartphone applications are available for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. A Windows 10 application can be downloaded from the Windows Store. Applications also exist for set-top boxes, video game consoles and connected TVs. Some applications are restricted to specific countries.

Countries

The service is currently restricted to Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, Germany, Norway (closed again in 2008), United Kingdom and France, but was in 2007 expected to expand to other European countries, (with Austria and Poland being at the top of that list) then to Canada and the US while adding fee-based channels to its list. It is also designed to only allow specific audiences to watch specific channels, thanks to geolocation of the IP address assigned to the user's computer (hence the restriction to a few countries for the time being).

On 19 December 2009, the Audiovisual Media Services Directive regarding watching TV online from other EU countries came into force. This does not affect Zattoo or other P2PTV providers at all, since the directive only changes the jurisdiction where a country does not allow the reception of a foreign TV channel due to different laws. But the reason why P2PTV channels are not available all over the EU is not that the country of the viewer would not allow it, but that the TV channel itself cannot allow it due to licensing restrictions of the TV programs.