SeeSaw Needs To Look At Spotify For Inspiration & Ideas

Maggie Brown of the Guardian asks a very pertinent questions about the business model of SeeSaw, the latest free video on demand service to come to the increasingly crowded UK market.

Seesaw will offer 3000 hours worth of programmes that will be streamed for free and is planning to offer a pay-per-programme feature from June 2010. It is still too early to say what the price per view will be but it is likely to be much less expensive than what Apple charges, on average £1.50.

Should Seesaw follow Spotify's path, one can expect it to gradually increase the amount of content on the service (an additional 2000 hours of premium programmes will be delivered soon), offer a HD version down the road, DRM-wrapped downloads as well as offline viewing.

We can even dream of having a mobile version of SeeSaw one day and even an unlimited, Spotify-like package. However, all this is unlikely to happen because of the costs involved due to the sheer size of the files.

Thinkbroadband says that a low quality video running for an hour would amount to roughly 200MB with the high quality version swallowing around 540MB, that's tens of times bigger than an audio file from Spotify.