New invention does away with the lag Internet TV has compared to traditional TV

Stockholm: Net Insight's new invention that enables synchronised live broadcasts on TV, tablets and smartphones could double its total addressable market in 1-2 years and should have a healthy impact on profit margins, its chief executive told Reuters.

The Internet often has a lag of a minute or more compared to traditional TV, causing particular headaches for broadcasters of live events such as sports, which Net Insight promises to help its customers do away with.

The Swedish firm in November introduced software enabling live broadcasts to be fully synchronized regardless of device, allowing it to enter the so-called over-the-top (OTT) TV market where video and TV can bypass traditional TV distribution.

Examples of OTT video providers include Netflix and Amazon Prime. Meanwhile, Juniper Research predicts that global end-user OTT TV subscription revenues will quadruple to $32 billion by 2019 from $8 billion in 2014.

Net Insight, which makes network products for video streaming, currently has a total addressable market of approximately 500 million euros, but its new market could outgrow that within a couple of years.

"It could take 1-2 years to surpass that size of addressable market," Net Insight Chief Executive Fredrik Tumegard said.

He also noted that it is much cheaper to produce software compared to network gear, so sales on large volumes will incur much lower costs. Net Insight will be paid in relation to the number of users and data volumes in its customers' network.

Its shares have risen 153 percent since November 25, when it announced that India's Tata Communications, which says it handles roughly a quarter of global Internet traffic, would be the first customer to try the innovation.

Tata, the official connectivity provider for Formula 1, said it had successfully tested the new technology at a race in Singapore this year.

Tumegard said the invention, which will be rolled out in the first half of 2016, would be difficult to replicate for competitors as it requires expertise from several areas such as synchronisation, video streams, networks and data centres.

"Someone would have done it a long time ago if it had been that easy," he added.