People's Television; Two German geeks are trying to do for TV what Napster did for music--make it free, and litigious.(televsion web service trades digitized programs)

Byline: Andreas Tzortzis

Guido Ciburski and a few friends had gathered around a computer screen to watch live coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games opening ceremony in Salt Lake City, Utah, over the Internet. Apparently other cyberfans had gotten the same idea--so many, in fact, that a server busy error message kept popping up. After a few minutes of clicking and waiting, they decided to give up and wait for their local television station in southern Germany to broadcast excerpts. "You quickly arrive at the question: how can I expect to watch this when so many people are downloading at the same time?" says Ciburski. The 40-year-old software engineer quickly turned his frustration into the germ of a new invention--and his next business idea. He and Petra Bauersachs, his partner at a small TV-technology company, began developing software that would turn so-called live video streaming over the Internet into a workable medium for the masses.

Three years later, Ciburski thinks they've cracked the problem. His new additional firm, Cybersky, is about to unveil a new television Web service that he claims will serve as a medium through which just about anybody can distribute video feeds for free. The site will also serve as a meeting place for people who want to swap digitized television programs. If all goes well, by the end of January Cybersky software will allow "Sopranos" fans in Singapore to get the show live-streamed into their apartment with only a five- to-10-second delay.

Sound familiar? It should. Cybersky is proposing to do for TV programs what Napster did for music a few years ago. And if successful, Cybersky could well shake up the television industry just as Napster--and now Kazaa and Grokster--rattled the music and film worlds. German broadcasters are already keeping a close watch on the firm's progress, and broadcasters in the United States, Europe and Asia also have cause for concern. Cybersky's potential for trading licensed programming could open up another round of court battles that have dogged file-sharing software since Napster.

Ciburski has patented software that gets around the server-overload problems that have plagued video-streaming applications in the past by taking advantage of peer-to-peer networking technology. Rather than using its ...