Welsh broadcaster S4C and Wesley Clover have put in £9.5million of second round investment into IPTV startup Inuk Networks’ freewiretv.com product. The money wil be used to further develop the platform and fund expansion in the UK, Ireland and North America. The move is not overly surprising. Wesley Clover is the venture vehicle of Wales-based Sir Terry Matthews, one of the UK’s leading technology entrepreneurs who seeded Inuk initially (and Inuk is based in Wales). Iona Jones, S4C’s Chief Executive and Chair of S4CDM, and David Sanders, a director of S4CDM, will both join the Inuk board of directors which is chaired by Simon Gibson OBE.
Freewire potentially offers broadband providers a way of offering digital TV. Howver so far it has only been tested on academic networks capable of high bandwisth multicasting, so it remains to be seen how it will scale acorss other netowrks. We reviewed it here.