Hello,
I've been tasked with measuring interest in a project some folks are working on, and this seemed like a good starting point.
24/7 channels are always the forgotten and neglected parts of most services. A lot of the time, they work poorly, the quality can be hit or miss, have encoding errors/mistakes, get stuck, and never get much love from the providers. They're low priority to them, since live linear streams are the bread and butter and what most people want to watch.. But 24/7 is certainly appreciated by some folks.
A few people have kicked around the idea of starting a service for IPTV providers (and end users as well) to try to rectify this. They're looking to focus exclusively on 24/7s, high quality sources transcoded consistently and correctly, high reliability with a good selection. Knowing this will only be an add-on service, the goal is to make it pretty cheap... Whether the best route is to sell direct or sell to resellers/providers is something they haven't hammered out yet.
I personally am frustrated with how poorly the 24/7 services work across pretty much every provider, and am quite interested in the idea (hence why I'm here posting)... But really, this is still at the ground level, and they want to see if it's something people will actually want before dumping a bunch of time into setting up the infrastructure to get it going... So this isn't a sales ad or anything, it's purely to gauge interest in deciding whether to move forward on setting up a project for this purpose. They'll be monitoring the feedback here.
So far, they've had me involved in some very small scale testing, and I think it has potential, seems like they've got a potential winner in terms of how well it seems to work... But I don't blame them for being wary of setting up a ton of infrastructure for something that nobody gives a shit about.
So really, negative or positive, please post and share your thoughts. And if you're a provider/reseller, please post from that perspective as well...