7 ms·

BitTorrent Live: Cheap, Real-Time P2P Video Streaming That Will Kill TV

158 points by brianbreslin 15y ago

wmf 15y ago
I think this article is remiss in not mentioning the dozen or so P2P live streaming systems that have been in production for years. Without any details (really, any at all), it's hard to connect this BitTorrent Live with the idea of killing TV. I agree that "people love what they see on television, but want it accessible from the Web", but one of the main reasons why is that people don't want to watch TV live (other than sports, which has even more geographical licensing problems than regular TV).
- hoi 15y ago
  It's the distribution method, not the TV per se that is being attacked, otherwise they would articulate the same thing in their Apple TV (iTV) article a few articles lower. The headline is just linkbait.
- moreorless 15y ago
  TC and their over the top headlines. If we had a nickel for every time they proclaim a killer of any entrenched industry leader, we would all be millionaires.
  - wmf 15y ago
    I wouldn't really blame TC in this case; they're just quoting Bram. (It's an irresistible quote; GigaOM ran with it too.)
    - aptwebapps 15y ago
      I would. They didn't just quote him. Here's the first para: "Television is going the way of the dinosaur, and the deadly comet is called BitTorrent Live. Today, Bram Cohen, the author of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer sharing protocol, demoed his latest creation at the SF MusicTech Summit." Nothing indicates that first sentence is a quote.
      - sanxiyn 15y ago
        It isn't, but this is: ""My goal is to kill off television" Cohen said during the SF MusicTech demo session I hosted."
- rictic 15y ago
  True, but in this case it's Bram Cohen saying it, which lends a lot of weight to the words. Still, I'd love to read about how it's supposed to work.
staunch 15y ago
The problem is, and always has been, on the client side. It's easy to dream up all sorts of amazing technologies if you're okay with making users download a new browser plugin or app. Flash sucks, but it's on every single PC. Netflix has the power to get users to install Silverlight -- Microsoft made that pretty easy. Unfortunately you probably don't have their library and will live to regret it[1]. Adobe is also working on this idea with RTMFP (their newest streaming protocol)[2] In fact few years there's been a company already doing this with a Flash Plugin (Yes dawg, there's a Plugin in my Plugin).[3] CNN use(d) it for quite a while. I wouldn't bet anything on BitTorrent adding anything interesting here. The technology may be difficult but it's not as difficult as overcoming the huge barriers to entry. The best we can hope for is that they create an open protocol the way they did with BitTorrent that browsers can implement over the next 5+ years. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost#Application_discontinued http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost#Application_discontinued 2. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/ 3. http://www.octoshape.com/addin/about.php http://www.octoshape.com/addin/about.php
- smokinn 15y ago
  On the other hand bittorrent live has great distribution channels: The Pirate Bay et al. There will be many people wanting to "stream bittorrent" and it'll get at least close to critical mass. Whether it can tip over into the mainstream will be the real question. One example I could see is justin.tv that's betting heavily (with their twitch.tv site) on esports which I'm pretty sure has a good overlap with people who know/use bittorrent. Another of course will be megaupload/megavideo v2.0. It's definitely something worth following.
  - rabidsnail 15y ago
    MLG used octoshape for a while, and it was notoriously unreliable. That left a bad taste in the mouth of the exports community when it comes to peer-to-peer distribution.
  - rabble 15y ago
    To me it seems like the rojadirecta.es folks, who are doing pirate live sports streaming, will love this.
forrestthewoods 15y ago
Meh, it's not solving the right problem to "kill TV". Content distribution isn't an issue. Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, HBO Go and more are all effective distribution mechanisms. At best this lowers the barrier of entry which is good, but that's not the real problem. The real issue is coming up with a sustainable business model that users are willing to pay for. Thus far monthly then monthly cable bill plus ads is ahead by a huge margin in terms of revenue. Content owners cutting out middle men is a good step, but the harder one is getting users to pay for it. Of course it could kill TV with copyright infringing streams, but that would be illegal and send people to jail ala MegaUpload.
- palish 15y ago
  Content owners cutting out middle men is a good step, but the harder one is getting users to pay for it. Interesting. By definition, that means middlemen are currently adding value.
rll 15y ago
For a good chunk of people it is still the cable companies that provide the last-mile pipe that something like this requires. And because they control it they can skew the bandwidth allocation towards their own digital TV side. You never hit a Comcast bandwidth cap by watching too much cable TV. But you can quite easily hit your "unlimited" bandwidth cap on the same pipe if you stream too much video over that very same cable prompting nasty email warnings and eventually termination of service. I don't see how BitTorrent Live addresses this in any way.
- mdaniel 15y ago
  As a pedantic note, I wonder if the cap is measured from your cable modem or access to and from the Internet. Because if it's the latter (ever how unlikely) then a P2P protocol could make a difference.
  - rll 15y ago
    I suppose that scenario could exist somewhere. It definitely doesn't on Comcast in the US.
    - mdaniel 15y ago
      I mean this in all honesty: how do you know that?
      - rll 15y ago
        Try a traceroute to your neighbour who is likely on the same physical Comcast segment as you. It's not a simple 2-hop route. It goes way out and comes back.
tomwalsham 15y ago
Sports fans have been using live P2P streaming for many years, the most obvious being Sopcast (sopcast.org - even the website is copyright 2007). The quality is pretty good, and the 'danger' posed was made clear with some of the first domain seizures being the stream aggregators - myp2p, rojadirecta etc. The difficulty with this technology 'replacing TV' is that realtime is only truly relevant for a few things - sports, maybe concerts and awards ceremonies - beyond these the on-demand paradigm is much more attractive. That's not to say that at scale a certain amount of bandwidth offloading couldn't happen to equivalent-timecode peers, but I suspect the biggest challenges to the complete overthrow of the cable networks model right now involve the notorious impossibility of negotiating agreements with the content owners, not the bandwidth/hardware cost of server-client streaming.
dotBen 15y ago
The problem is, and always has been, on the content side. Most people in the mainstream still want to spend their time watching mainstream shows - and no mainstream US-based content holder is interested in offering internet-based streaming of their TV channels (as a live stream of the live broadcast). If they were, they would have done so already. [this just launched today, and read the cavets: http://allthingsd.com/20120213/barry-diller-gets-into-the-cord-cutting-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20120213/barry-diller-gets-into-the-co...] Case in point: There is no Comfast Xfinity or Dish style subscription that is online only that doesn't require a cable box or dish as your primary source of reception. I'm sure everyone on Hacker News would love to subscribe such a service but the rights holders are having none of it. What's stopping these companies is not that they can't push the bits but that they want to protect their existing investments and not find themselves in a commoditized and highly competitive market with many players. Comcast in most markets has no competition for cable, Dish has no competition. They don't want to race to the bottom and compete with upstart startups that we might be running - so they're playing hard ball with the rights holders (or they are the rights holders too - Comcast owns NBC) and having none of it. I like Bram, I like this technology and I think there are lots of awesome things we (away from mainstream) can do with it. But it won't kill TV because the majority of people want mainstream content. And that's going to sit on TV (in some form) for some time to come.
- pat2man 15y ago
  There is a reason that Apple (not Napster) killed the physical CD. To digitize the TV distribution network we need someone with the legal team to properly negotiate these licenses. BitTorrent is already here, it already distributes TV and the networks will never use it. The future of TV first involves someone like Apple or Google working with the content providers and the ISPs to provide a solution that everyone can agree with (probably with DRM). This is what happened with music, it will happen again with TV. What his really provides is a way for two generations from now to steam media, but it's dilusional to think that this technology is what people will be using that far into the future.
  - dotBen 15y ago
    "The future of TV first involves someone like Apple or Google working with the content providers and the ISPs to provide a solution" Won't happen. The music industry handed, well, the music industry to Apple on a plate. The wider media watched, learned and face slapped. Apple and Google are far too powerful for the media to hand any more of that kind of control to. Watch how Google really is struggling to get industry partnership with Google Music. With Hulu we saw major players (NBC, ABC and Fox) come together and build out a solution themselves. My guess is that any future internet-based "TV subscription service" will come from a similar joint venture. The technology isn't that difficult so why hand over the keys to a 3rd party when they can own things themselves? My personal aspiration is that the %age of the population who want to buy tv subscriptions (by whatever medium - cable, dish, internet) will actually decrease and the power will shift away from the existing incumbents simply providing the same service over a new medium but to actually something radically different.
shalmanese 15y ago
Veetle (http://veetle.com/ http://veetle.com/) has had a functioning demo of such a technology live for at least a year now.
- vetler 15y ago
  What is this?! The Twilight Zone? Vetle is a fairly uncommon Norwegian name, and happens to be my first name. Very weird.
fungi 15y ago
> “It fits the DNA of what BitTorrent is about because it’s open and free.” > An SDK to work with the proprietary protocol is in the works. I'm confused
newhouseb 15y ago
It's always funny to read about P2P TV being sold as the cutting edge in the western world, when in fact China has been using P2P TV since 2004. I've used both PPLive and SOPCast to varying degrees of success in the 'states and according to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPLive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPLive) PPLive reported 105 million monthly active users in december 2010, so it's no small phenomenon. The interesting question is which components of the media environment in China allowed for the growth of such technology well ahead of western users.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
chrischen 15y ago
I'd be interested to know how this compares to Flash multicasting... especially since Flash is already installed in most browsers. http://www.flashrealtime.com/multicast-explained-flash-101-p2p/ http://www.flashrealtime.com/multicast-explained-flash-101-p...
ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
= What I wished and thought BitTorrent Live was going to be = Pirated P2P TVOIP with 1 minute delay: People with REALLY good computers and TV capture cards would record and encode video streams in real time and would seed them out through Bittorent Live. The video might not be in real time but even a 1 minute delay would be fine. Hey live TV and Cable over IP would be awesome. My mom's been wanting to watch the Opera Winfrey Network so badly I'd love to get it working on the laptop. Commercials and all. Hell, the woman in me would love to watch it too. Yeah it's "pirating", but we do it because content creators don't give us what we want. I don't care about licenses I just want the Operah Winfrey Network, NATGEO, and the Science Channel. Piracy is the only way to make it work. Television, Film, & Music are stagnant industries that refuse to evolve unless and until they are forced to. And the Pirates have to innovate here, I believe.
nextparadigms 15y ago
This kind of technology should be integrated in the browsers, and obviously be open source. Google should've been working on something like this for Youtube. It would save them a lot of money. They wouldn't even need to use it 100% of the time, just for the more popular videos who are constantly watched.
netcan 15y ago
wow. All this negativity and dismissiveness about what is potentially a good & impactful technology. if it works well, it could mean netflix that is free (the difference between free & cheap is big). It might change what people watch (like youtube). It might change how/if people pay for it. yes. I agree tomorrow morning tv as we know it will be unchanged. I can see lots of paths from here to someplace different that could involve such a service.
- Terretta 15y ago
  How does it make Netflix free when Netflix has to spend half a billion dollars buying the content? Netflix's content bill is far bigger than their bandwidth bill.
pajju 15y ago
There are lots of Interesting things that can be done on top of this Bit-torrent Protocol. I smell - they are slowly building a platform and a Dev Community. There will be an App Store around. These apps are html5; Browser Based, p2p Powered apps and do p2p Distributed computations. Expect Bittorrent based dropbox, File-sharing apps, p2p voice apps(skype?), Real-time Broadcasting, TV content Stream - Pay as you Use Apps. Web app code will be distributed as torrents over the internet. You just download app code from your closest peers/seeds nearby eventually making up for the whole file(i.e app code). This is a new generation of distributed apps. Low on Latency. The only bottleneck today is your bandwidth.
BuddhaSource 15y ago
Joost tried this with their P2P desktop client. I was really impressed with the performance and latency. Technology was one side of the story but in reality Joost failed to get traction, I hope BitTorrent Live is able to make use of the technology may be integrate with existing bit torrent clients.
mariuolo 15y ago
It will end like Joost broadcasting second- and third-rate shows. Technologies like this can indeed reduce infrastructure cost not having to rely on expensive CDNs, but startups don't have the financial muscle to acquire interesting contents.
dustingetz 15y ago
spotify does this at music-scale: "Spotify – Large Scale, Low Latency, P2PMusic-on-Demand Streaming" [1] TLDR: getting low latency, low stutter playback is a lot more complicated than bittorrent, but clearly possible, and already solved. as dotBen points out, it doesn't prevent Spotify's business from getting re-negotiated into the ground every 3 years by the ip rights-holders. i would like to see the technology sponsored by a business or industry who cares about freedom of information - like the press - otherwise it's just a few nerds working on a startup. I mean, app, I mean, toy project. [1] (googlecache) http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10.pdf http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
nachteilig 15y ago
I'm not sure why sensationalist headlines like this are necessary. As has been stated, the real problem is getting content. Lots of technologies exist that could have "killed" TV but haven't.

158 points by brianbreslin 15y ago

wmf 15y ago

I think this article is remiss in not mentioning the dozen or so P2P live streaming systems that have been in production for years. Without any details (really, any at all), it's hard to connect this BitTorrent Live with the idea of killing TV. I agree that "people love what they see on television, but want it accessible from the Web", but one of the main reasons why is that people don't want to watch TV live (other than sports, which has even more geographical licensing problems than regular TV).

hoi 15y ago
It's the distribution method, not the TV per se that is being attacked, otherwise they would articulate the same thing in their Apple TV (iTV) article a few articles lower. The headline is just linkbait.
moreorless 15y ago
TC and their over the top headlines. If we had a nickel for every time they proclaim a killer of any entrenched industry leader, we would all be millionaires.
- wmf 15y ago
  I wouldn't really blame TC in this case; they're just quoting Bram. (It's an irresistible quote; GigaOM ran with it too.)
  - aptwebapps 15y ago
    I would. They didn't just quote him. Here's the first para: "Television is going the way of the dinosaur, and the deadly comet is called BitTorrent Live. Today, Bram Cohen, the author of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer sharing protocol, demoed his latest creation at the SF MusicTech Summit." Nothing indicates that first sentence is a quote.
    - sanxiyn 15y ago
      It isn't, but this is: ""My goal is to kill off television" Cohen said during the SF MusicTech demo session I hosted."
rictic 15y ago
True, but in this case it's Bram Cohen saying it, which lends a lot of weight to the words. Still, I'd love to read about how it's supposed to work.

staunch 15y ago

The problem is, and always has been, on the client side. It's easy to dream up all sorts of amazing technologies if you're okay with making users download a new browser plugin or app. Flash sucks, but it's on every single PC. Netflix has the power to get users to install Silverlight -- Microsoft made that pretty easy. Unfortunately you probably don't have their library and will live to regret it[1]. Adobe is also working on this idea with RTMFP (their newest streaming protocol)[2] In fact few years there's been a company already doing this with a Flash Plugin (Yes dawg, there's a Plugin in my Plugin).[3] CNN use(d) it for quite a while. I wouldn't bet anything on BitTorrent adding anything interesting here. The technology may be difficult but it's not as difficult as overcoming the huge barriers to entry. The best we can hope for is that they create an open protocol the way they did with BitTorrent that browsers can implement over the next 5+ years. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost#Application_discontinued http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost#Application_discontinued 2. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/ 3. http://www.octoshape.com/addin/about.php http://www.octoshape.com/addin/about.php

smokinn 15y ago
On the other hand bittorrent live has great distribution channels: The Pirate Bay et al. There will be many people wanting to "stream bittorrent" and it'll get at least close to critical mass. Whether it can tip over into the mainstream will be the real question. One example I could see is justin.tv that's betting heavily (with their twitch.tv site) on esports which I'm pretty sure has a good overlap with people who know/use bittorrent. Another of course will be megaupload/megavideo v2.0. It's definitely something worth following.
- rabidsnail 15y ago
  MLG used octoshape for a while, and it was notoriously unreliable. That left a bad taste in the mouth of the exports community when it comes to peer-to-peer distribution.
- rabble 15y ago
  To me it seems like the rojadirecta.es folks, who are doing pirate live sports streaming, will love this.

forrestthewoods 15y ago

Meh, it's not solving the right problem to "kill TV". Content distribution isn't an issue. Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, HBO Go and more are all effective distribution mechanisms. At best this lowers the barrier of entry which is good, but that's not the real problem. The real issue is coming up with a sustainable business model that users are willing to pay for. Thus far monthly then monthly cable bill plus ads is ahead by a huge margin in terms of revenue. Content owners cutting out middle men is a good step, but the harder one is getting users to pay for it. Of course it could kill TV with copyright infringing streams, but that would be illegal and send people to jail ala MegaUpload.

palish 15y ago
Content owners cutting out middle men is a good step, but the harder one is getting users to pay for it. Interesting. By definition, that means middlemen are currently adding value.

rll 15y ago

For a good chunk of people it is still the cable companies that provide the last-mile pipe that something like this requires. And because they control it they can skew the bandwidth allocation towards their own digital TV side. You never hit a Comcast bandwidth cap by watching too much cable TV. But you can quite easily hit your "unlimited" bandwidth cap on the same pipe if you stream too much video over that very same cable prompting nasty email warnings and eventually termination of service. I don't see how BitTorrent Live addresses this in any way.

mdaniel 15y ago
As a pedantic note, I wonder if the cap is measured from your cable modem or access to and from the Internet. Because if it's the latter (ever how unlikely) then a P2P protocol could make a difference.
- rll 15y ago
  I suppose that scenario could exist somewhere. It definitely doesn't on Comcast in the US.
  - mdaniel 15y ago
    I mean this in all honesty: how do you know that?
    - rll 15y ago
      Try a traceroute to your neighbour who is likely on the same physical Comcast segment as you. It's not a simple 2-hop route. It goes way out and comes back.

tomwalsham 15y ago

Sports fans have been using live P2P streaming for many years, the most obvious being Sopcast (sopcast.org - even the website is copyright 2007). The quality is pretty good, and the 'danger' posed was made clear with some of the first domain seizures being the stream aggregators - myp2p, rojadirecta etc. The difficulty with this technology 'replacing TV' is that realtime is only truly relevant for a few things - sports, maybe concerts and awards ceremonies - beyond these the on-demand paradigm is much more attractive. That's not to say that at scale a certain amount of bandwidth offloading couldn't happen to equivalent-timecode peers, but I suspect the biggest challenges to the complete overthrow of the cable networks model right now involve the notorious impossibility of negotiating agreements with the content owners, not the bandwidth/hardware cost of server-client streaming.

dotBen 15y ago

The problem is, and always has been, on the content side. Most people in the mainstream still want to spend their time watching mainstream shows - and no mainstream US-based content holder is interested in offering internet-based streaming of their TV channels (as a live stream of the live broadcast). If they were, they would have done so already. [this just launched today, and read the cavets: http://allthingsd.com/20120213/barry-diller-gets-into-the-cord-cutting-business/ http://allthingsd.com/20120213/barry-diller-gets-into-the-co...] Case in point: There is no Comfast Xfinity or Dish style subscription that is online only that doesn't require a cable box or dish as your primary source of reception. I'm sure everyone on Hacker News would love to subscribe such a service but the rights holders are having none of it. What's stopping these companies is not that they can't push the bits but that they want to protect their existing investments and not find themselves in a commoditized and highly competitive market with many players. Comcast in most markets has no competition for cable, Dish has no competition. They don't want to race to the bottom and compete with upstart startups that we might be running - so they're playing hard ball with the rights holders (or they are the rights holders too - Comcast owns NBC) and having none of it. I like Bram, I like this technology and I think there are lots of awesome things we (away from mainstream) can do with it. But it won't kill TV because the majority of people want mainstream content. And that's going to sit on TV (in some form) for some time to come.

pat2man 15y ago
There is a reason that Apple (not Napster) killed the physical CD. To digitize the TV distribution network we need someone with the legal team to properly negotiate these licenses. BitTorrent is already here, it already distributes TV and the networks will never use it. The future of TV first involves someone like Apple or Google working with the content providers and the ISPs to provide a solution that everyone can agree with (probably with DRM). This is what happened with music, it will happen again with TV. What his really provides is a way for two generations from now to steam media, but it's dilusional to think that this technology is what people will be using that far into the future.
- dotBen 15y ago
  "The future of TV first involves someone like Apple or Google working with the content providers and the ISPs to provide a solution" Won't happen. The music industry handed, well, the music industry to Apple on a plate. The wider media watched, learned and face slapped. Apple and Google are far too powerful for the media to hand any more of that kind of control to. Watch how Google really is struggling to get industry partnership with Google Music. With Hulu we saw major players (NBC, ABC and Fox) come together and build out a solution themselves. My guess is that any future internet-based "TV subscription service" will come from a similar joint venture. The technology isn't that difficult so why hand over the keys to a 3rd party when they can own things themselves? My personal aspiration is that the %age of the population who want to buy tv subscriptions (by whatever medium - cable, dish, internet) will actually decrease and the power will shift away from the existing incumbents simply providing the same service over a new medium but to actually something radically different.

shalmanese 15y ago

Veetle (http://veetle.com/ http://veetle.com/) has had a functioning demo of such a technology live for at least a year now.

vetler 15y ago
What is this?! The Twilight Zone? Vetle is a fairly uncommon Norwegian name, and happens to be my first name. Very weird.

fungi 15y ago

> “It fits the DNA of what BitTorrent is about because it’s open and free.” > An SDK to work with the proprietary protocol is in the works. I'm confused

newhouseb 15y ago

It's always funny to read about P2P TV being sold as the cutting edge in the western world, when in fact China has been using P2P TV since 2004. I've used both PPLive and SOPCast to varying degrees of success in the 'states and according to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPLive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPLive) PPLive reported 105 million monthly active users in december 2010, so it's no small phenomenon. The interesting question is which components of the media environment in China allowed for the growth of such technology well ahead of western users.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

chrischen 15y ago

I'd be interested to know how this compares to Flash multicasting... especially since Flash is already installed in most browsers. http://www.flashrealtime.com/multicast-explained-flash-101-p2p/ http://www.flashrealtime.com/multicast-explained-flash-101-p...

ChrisNorstrom 15y ago

= What I wished and thought BitTorrent Live was going to be = Pirated P2P TVOIP with 1 minute delay: People with REALLY good computers and TV capture cards would record and encode video streams in real time and would seed them out through Bittorent Live. The video might not be in real time but even a 1 minute delay would be fine. Hey live TV and Cable over IP would be awesome. My mom's been wanting to watch the Opera Winfrey Network so badly I'd love to get it working on the laptop. Commercials and all. Hell, the woman in me would love to watch it too. Yeah it's "pirating", but we do it because content creators don't give us what we want. I don't care about licenses I just want the Operah Winfrey Network, NATGEO, and the Science Channel. Piracy is the only way to make it work. Television, Film, & Music are stagnant industries that refuse to evolve unless and until they are forced to. And the Pirates have to innovate here, I believe.

nextparadigms 15y ago

This kind of technology should be integrated in the browsers, and obviously be open source. Google should've been working on something like this for Youtube. It would save them a lot of money. They wouldn't even need to use it 100% of the time, just for the more popular videos who are constantly watched.

netcan 15y ago

wow. All this negativity and dismissiveness about what is potentially a good & impactful technology. if it works well, it could mean netflix that is free (the difference between free & cheap is big). It might change what people watch (like youtube). It might change how/if people pay for it. yes. I agree tomorrow morning tv as we know it will be unchanged. I can see lots of paths from here to someplace different that could involve such a service.

Terretta 15y ago
How does it make Netflix free when Netflix has to spend half a billion dollars buying the content? Netflix's content bill is far bigger than their bandwidth bill.

pajju 15y ago

There are lots of Interesting things that can be done on top of this Bit-torrent Protocol. I smell - they are slowly building a platform and a Dev Community. There will be an App Store around. These apps are html5; Browser Based, p2p Powered apps and do p2p Distributed computations. Expect Bittorrent based dropbox, File-sharing apps, p2p voice apps(skype?), Real-time Broadcasting, TV content Stream - Pay as you Use Apps. Web app code will be distributed as torrents over the internet. You just download app code from your closest peers/seeds nearby eventually making up for the whole file(i.e app code). This is a new generation of distributed apps. Low on Latency. The only bottleneck today is your bandwidth.

BuddhaSource 15y ago

Joost tried this with their P2P desktop client. I was really impressed with the performance and latency. Technology was one side of the story but in reality Joost failed to get traction, I hope BitTorrent Live is able to make use of the technology may be integrate with existing bit torrent clients.

mariuolo 15y ago

It will end like Joost broadcasting second- and third-rate shows. Technologies like this can indeed reduce infrastructure cost not having to rely on expensive CDNs, but startups don't have the financial muscle to acquire interesting contents.

dustingetz 15y ago

spotify does this at music-scale: "Spotify – Large Scale, Low Latency, P2PMusic-on-Demand Streaming" [1] TLDR: getting low latency, low stutter playback is a lot more complicated than bittorrent, but clearly possible, and already solved. as dotBen points out, it doesn't prevent Spotify's business from getting re-negotiated into the ground every 3 years by the ip rights-holders. i would like to see the technology sponsored by a business or industry who cares about freedom of information - like the press - otherwise it's just a few nerds working on a startup. I mean, app, I mean, toy project. [1] (googlecache) http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10.pdf http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

nachteilig 15y ago

I'm not sure why sensationalist headlines like this are necessary. As has been stated, the real problem is getting content. Lots of technologies exist that could have "killed" TV but haven't.