LiveStation, which would enable high-quality viewing of live television programs on a PC or other computing device, is being touted as an alternative to technologies like Joost that enable PCs to show pre-recorded TV programs, but not live shows.

Unlike Joost, LiveStation is a peer-to-peer technology, which means that once the PC acquires programming, it can be shared with other devices like a set-top box or, at some point, a cell phone.

"As far as we can tell, the average user doesn't care to watch TV on their cell phone, but that might change with the iPhone," noted Rob Enderle, president of the San Jose-based Enderle Group. On the other hand, he pointed out, watching video on a laptop while traveling is not uncommon and, "we've seen a number of products do reasonably well in this area."

Coming Soon To a PC Near You

According to British media reports, early beta testing of LiveStation is taking place in the U.K., running broadcasts from the BBC. While in the U.S., CBS Television Stations announced in April that it would adopt Silverlight -- the Microsoft technology underlying LiveStation -- for its Web TV initiative that is expected to launch later this year.

Technically, the LiveStation service is not a Microsoft offering. Microsoft actually sold the LiveStation technology to Skinkers in exchange for a 10 percent stake in the British software developer. Nonetheless, the Redmond, Wash. software giant has a lot riding on LiveStation's success.

According to Enderle, LiveStation is one of the first big applications for Microsoft's SilverLight browser plug-in that is used to view streaming media. Silverlight is a direct challenger to plug-ins like Adobe's Flash media viewer. If LiveStation works well, Enderle said, it could convince Apple to support Silverlight for its iPhone products.

Leading the Pack?

While the field of streaming TV programming to a PC is already well populated by companies like Joost, SlingMedia, Pinnacle, and TiVo, no one has done a tremendous job in the area of live video streaming, said Enderle. What Microsoft has going for it, besides being deeply entrenched in the PC market, is a wealth of capabilities, from managing the media itself using its media-server product, to video compression and decompression, and the ability to optimize the video stream so that bandwidth issues on the user's end are less noticeable.

The net result for viewers, according to Enderle, could be a better overall experience.

"Microsoft has got more parts of the solution than anyone else. The end result is they've got the potential -- and potential is a big word -- to do better in this space than anyone else," he said. "So it's just a question of execution."

Execution... that's another big word, indeed.