About Zattoo

Some facts and figures on Zattoo for people in a hurry:

  • Founded in 2005 by Sugih Jamin, Beat Knecht, and Wenjie Wang
  • Currently about 40 employees
  • Service launched in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK so far
  • Offices in Ann Arbor, Michigan/USA and Zurich, Switzerland

So much for the basics. But that’s not all by far:

A nostalgic look back

A long long time ago, Beat and Sugih met when both were studying at the University of California at Berkeley. After university, Beat went off to do his stuff, which mainly involved becoming a McKinsey consultant, getting an MBA at IMD, and joining Linuxcare (now Levanta). Meanwhile, Sugih stayed on at university, continuing with research in computer science, getting tenure as Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and collecting numerous awards for outstanding work in science. Despite pursuing separate career paths, Sugih and Beat kept in touch over the years, joined by a shared interest in all things IT and the urge to eventually be their own boss.

This joint dream finally started taking shape when Sugih approached Beat in 2005 with a new technology, developed under his supervision by Wenjie Wang, that enabled live video to be transmitted over the Internet at an unprecedented quality. The three of them envisioned a world united by people watching TV whenever and wherever they wanted. With this business opportunity in mind, they set up a core team of computer scientists and started talking to potential investors and business partners. A year later, in June 2006, Zattoo launched its service in Switzerland. A few days before the soccer World Cup, the Swiss started downloading the Zattoo player, which enabled them to watch four TV channels on their computer.

In the meantime, things have heated up. Since those good ol’ early days, we’ve stumbled upon a course to conquer the world give viewers all over the world broadcast TV to watch on their PC. So far, we’ve enlarged our channel offering in Switzerland to 60, and also launched in Denmark (April 2007), Spain (June 2007), Germany and Belgium (September 2007), Norway (October 2007), the UK (December 2007), and France (January 2008). Next on the list are all other countries.

It’s nice to see that our efforts are recognized every now and then. In 2006 Zattoo was one of the ten winners of the Venture business plan competition, and in March 2007 Red Herring awarded us one of their – well – Red Herring awards. And in June 2008 eco, the German association of Internet business, awarded Zattoo the innovation prize for outstanding and innovative achievements in the Internet industry. Google was the winner two years earlier …

Last, but honestly not least, we’d like to thank all of you. For believing in us, for downloading our player and using it and giving us feedback and positive as well as critical input and thus cheering us on and challenging us to get better and better. We couldn’t have done it without you, folks.