Slashdot Mirror
Roll Your Own Television Network Using Bittorrent
Cryofan writes "Mark Pesce, lecturer at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) writes here and here about using p2p networks, specifically bittorrent, to create a grassroots television network. He cites as an example the BBC's "Flexible TV" internet broadcasting model using that as the core of a "new sort of television network, one which could harness the power of P2P distribution to create a global television network." Producers of video entertainment and news would provide a single copy of a program into the network of P2P clients, and the p2p network peers distribute the content themselves. Thus, a virtual 'newswiki' where the content is distributed bittorrent using some sort of 'trusted peer' or moderator mechanisms as a filtering/evaluation mechanism. So what is stopping anyone from doing this now? Awareness of the concept, perhaps? Lack of broadband connections? Lack of business models for content producers?"
many people have to pay for their broadband bits, so it costs quite a lot to leech stuff off bittorrent
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Between this and the Podcasting article, one thing is to be for sure:
Slashdot is looking to become the next media giant
I, for one, welcome our new Slashdot overlords?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I think what is stopping people now is a lack of legal content that they can share. You can bet that nobody wants to watch my home videos.
All someone would need to run a station would be to run an rss feed. Everyone would download .torrents basied on the RSS, then boom, instant 'station'. Hell, i might pay someone to access their RSS feed for this purpose.
Piracy is Adam Smiths invisble hand fisting you in the ass, Mr. Gates. - MightyMartian (840721)
How about the average broadband connection having an upstream quota cap. 1.5GB of upstream traffic a month for me, and not a byte more unless I "contribute" a generous amount to my ISP.
This is still one of the major issues for me when it comes to ISPs. If I would download something popular from bittorrent or edonkey, 1.5GB is absolutely nothing. So the only solution would be if I were to firewall incoming connection and be a leech, or put QOS on all traffic going out, limiting it to 0.5K/s.
This all is of course hypothetically speaking... ;)
I think one big hurdle to this sort of thing would be how do you cover you're costs.
Producing even a basic news show still costs money, even if all the people running it are volunteers.
Haven't people used bit torrent to download TV shows for as long as it has existed?
Ohhh, you mean legitimately!
Whenever a new episode of Stargate comes out a bittorrent streams it live as it is created... I'm not sure exactly how they're doing it but they're doing. The reason nobody is legally doing it because the distributors pay them I.E. the local broadcasters and sattelite/cable companies for usage. It's an extra dollar they wouldn't make. Actualy it's an extra million dollars they wouldn't make.
While I think Bittorent is pretty easy to use when I tried to explain it to my sister she had no idea what I was talking about and wanted to know why it was better than Kaazaa. In order for this to take off beyond the geek community to average users it needs to be somehow streamed to a easy to use media player or embeded in a webpage. There is a lot of potential with this type of technology, but it really needs to be super-easy to make any kind of splash. And I can also see this type of network abusing the end user who isn't smart enough to exit the program and then can't figure out why their internet connection has been moving at dial-up speed for the last 3 weeks.
but then again, if everybody started limiting their outgoing bandwidth, this will never work.
'Thus, a virtual 'newswiki' where the content is distributed bittorrent using some sort of 'trusted peer' or moderator mechanisms as a filtering/evaluation mechanism. So what is stopping anyone from doing this now? Awareness of the concept, perhaps? Lack of broadband connections? Lack of business models for content producers?"'
isn't this EXACTLY what suprnova is doing?
sure its mostly an illigal "network" but it still substitutes for TV and pushes a hell of a lot of content across it.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Lack of legal to share content that's worth watching (besides pay-per-view stuff like live pr0n, who needs better authentication to collect payment).
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Is anyone else getting tired of hearing about wiki's? I'm probably on the outside looking in... but man... please just shut up w/ all the wiki crap. The blog-mania was bad enough.
NEWSFLASH: CBS to merge w/ Hancock Fabrics citign synergies in their fabrication departments.
There is a public access cable station where I live, so my first thought was why bother? Do we really need to have that funny guy that lives by the old slaughter house broadcasting world wide his theories about alien brian implants?
/. type site with a moderation system, and let people submit their own footage of local news stories. You would get excellent coverage (OSS though: many eyes is a good thing), and it would be hard to censor stories. Localization/Translation might be tricky, though...
From the standpoint of news broadcasting, this could be really big, though. Set up a
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
What happens when people start embedding viruses and worms into media files? With the GDI+ vulnerability, it's only a matter of time. And it'd be easy for people on a p2p network to modify the file and start sharing it. Sure, you could have moderators etc, specified distributors, whatever, but that sort of destroys the point of having something like this utilize a p2p network. And if it's very popular, then you know the files would have a high likelihood of being modified and corrupted. Or how about simple work arounds to make the file appear to be of one media type when it's really another? Sure, few people on slashdot would have to worry about getting tricked. But we're not the masses. And isn't that what this sort of thing is aimed at?
australian project gutenberg is better than the original.
The real problem with this idea is ubiquity of signal. Anyone can post anything they want, even if broadcasters closed off a single p2p service just their programs there would always be competing services. Pr0n, wicked graphic hunting shows, and real-life stuff would dominate the bandwidth, things we may want to keep our kids away from.
M
seriously, these articles are strange. the author takes a really new concept that no one has really heard of, or at least the implementation is new and then writes something saying:
OMG TEH MAN HE DOES NOT LIKE P2P! THIZ NEW IDEA IZ PROOF! EVERY T>V MUST USE P2P, BITORRENT IZ JEZ"US! I HATH PROVEN THE MAN HATEZ GOOD IDEAZ!!!!!!! HAR HAR! DOWN WITH CORPORATIONS Who WATZE!
when in reality no one has really considered the concept in all actuality. and for some reason the author fails to notice, could make the whole idea worthless anyway. but we get an interesting slashdot read.......
Has anyone thought of using a P2P network such as Gnutella or Edonkey / Emule for this? What if the provider's webpage had a link for a file hash to be found and for Emule to automatically download. The content is secure because its very difficult to generate a forged file for a hash thus a 'trusted peer' moderator wouldn't be needed. Mule is very good at redistributing content across its entire network even if its not actively being downloaded by yourself, it spreads rare files across the network to ensure that all content is accessible. Any comments on this? This would also useful for general file sharing too.
The one little problem is that bittorrent is not a streaming protocol. It cuts up the whole file and sends a different piece in random order to each client. Each client then trades there piece with the other clients. So you can't go linearly through a video segment without having the whole thing. You could make smaller downloadable segments that would download and then auto load sequentially. It wouldn't be live though.
I don't know about the rest of you, but when I try to download something from a bit torrent source, it takes several hours over a DSL modem. This even happens on torrents that have a lot of seeds and a lot of downloaders. So how feasible is it to have P2P, on-demand television? Even if you could stream them, the download rates are far from constant so you would have to pause a lot to accumulate a buffer.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
Using bittorrent to distribute movie files is cool. But it is not exactly network broadcasting.
P2P Radio is the way to go. It can stream audio and video using peers. There are some p2p radio stations out there and TV stations are not far behind.
Python script to convert photos into "artsy" portraits: http://p2pbridge.sf.net/pyPortrait/
You could build into the clients a way of rating peers. If a lot of peers think the content distributed by a certain peer is good, then that peer gets a high trust rating. Just download video from peers with a high trust rating.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I already do this using shareaza, a video card that supports tv out(radeon 9500 pro), and windows extended desktop feature. I live in Alaska where cable and internet are rather expensive. I only have a few shows I watch on tv so it didn't make since to me to pay for $60-70 a month for cable just for a couple of shows. I would pay for a service like this if it was actually offered but until then i will use bittorrent/shareaza.
Great, this will allow people to create their own reality tv shows out of their homes, as if reality tv didn't suck enough already.
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
A friend and I produce a little 1/2 hour news talk show which we broadcast on local cable channel three. Now we are looking to get it on our local pbs station. costs are negligable. My friend who is a tech freak has the latest G5 with a DV card and a high end Sony Cam (about $5000 in hardware). Studio time is free based on cable regulations. (if your not aware FCC requires cable operators to provide free service and equipment to local users.) for us this included a studio with 3 mounted cameras, an editing room and post editing equipment. The hardest recourse is time. but for someone who is dedicated is the price we pay.
Check out Torrentocracy for a way to download bit torrented content from RSS feeds straight to your TV. As far as content, that's the major stumbling block. There needs to be more people willing to license under the Creative Commons. Per that, I'm also currently hosting interviews from Robert Greenwald's last two movies, Outfoxed and Uncovered.
What kind of home videos are we exactly talking about? Maybe you have to change the actors and plot a bit. Masks are optional.
Whats stopping is lost revenues in advertisements, piracy even know they willingly give this out. But is basically a revenue issue and current contract agreements with companies.
This kind of app makes BitTorrent into a P2P multicasting network. Finally, URIs (Universal Resource Identifiers) for media objects aren't limited to URLs (Universal Resource Locators), constrained by network topologies like bandwidth and persistence. Where's the streaming version for media play that doesn't need saving, with buffering and caching for a truly distributed media cloud? All the multicast experimenters, from MBONE to Internet2 and beyond should jump on this platform, finally meeting rubber with road on the infobahn.
--
make install -not war
I duno about anyone else, but this is old news to me. Everyone here should already know this though:
Broadband + BT = commercial free, on demand, what you want television.
If you start making newscasts, good for you. If you put them up on BT and people actually download them and watch them, well, good for you again.
This is not for live broadcasts, basically it's for downloading and viewing later. BT works wonderfully for this. I select something off one of the sites and it's ready to watch in the evening.
I suppose if you watch more than an hour of TV a night then it's a problem. But for me I have limited number of shows I'll watch. Netflix fills in the movie needs, but I'm giving serious consideration to stopping that as well.
I attended this talk at the National Student Media Conference last weekend, ( for any other attendees, I was the NSMC volunteer managing the digital projectors... ) and it was interesting to see the ideas mooted here percolating out into the other panels that took place over the rest of the conference. I think the independant media needs to continue to forge closer ties with the tech community to allow things like this to come to fruition.
One thing that didn't get brought up was whether this will compete with or complement Indymedia's upcoming IVDN video distribution framework. I was hoping to chase Mark up on this after the conference, but lost his email address - thanks submitter!
YLFIP.S., Mark, if you're reading this, I crashed in your suite on Sunday night - thanks for the keys. :-P
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
...then you have a lot more users than you have now, and since it is broadband, a lot faster (and assuming symmetric upload and download speeds), and everyone on the network is sharing, AND you have clients and a p2p network built along the BT model, but easier to use, then you have a network worthy of being called a network.
Look at the broadband connections being offered in Korea, or many parts of Europe. Imagine how you could put a really fat pipe to work, if most everyone has one.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I would be willing to pay a few bucks a year, *directly to the producers* to be able to legitimately download, say, "Scrubs" or "Stargate" as soon as they are "produced".
Firewalls
While it's true that we will be able to choose what we see, I'd argue that the sudden lack of cost in producing a program may instigate a whole new wave of crappy programs...
Any connection-based protocol suffers from scaling problems, especially on the scope this article implies. If you want to do a media broadcast, you should be using IP multicast in realtime. Then you don't need to worry about upload rates either, you get maximal efficiency and data only has to move in one direction around the network.
All of the P2P networks have this problem because they are connection-based and on-demand. A TV network is not on-demand, it's a fixed message delivered on a published schedule. That's the model that works most efficiently, making the most efficient use of the transport medium. For the internet you can be somewhat flexible and start redundant broadcasts at staggered time intervals, but in general, if you don't start listening/downloading when the stream starts, tough.
For compressed video you need to make sure that there are plenty of I-frames in the stream so that people can come in at any arbitrary point and sync up, but that's no big deal. Also if you take this approach you don't need to broadcast multiple streams of the same content at different resolutions/bitrates, the network itself will provide rate reduction by dropping frames that the receiver can't pick up fast enough. (Tho doing that will make the audio pretty noisy; I guess you can do low bandwidth streams if you really want to. Or just do separate bandwidth streams for the audio. That way if one audio stream needs too much bandwidth and is losing too many packets you can just select a lower bandwidth stream instead.)
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
Peercast already allows for P2P video streams in most popular formats.
I've had a go with it and its not too shabby.
With clients for Mac, Linux and Windows, availability is good. Unfortunately, Peercast doesn't advertise themselves too well which means there aren't so many video streams available yet (typically 5-15 video streams and 100 or so Audio streams.)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Hear, hear. We've got a PLETHORA of distribution methods already.
Until we have a method to make content production viable, there's going to be nothing to stream.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is an excellent point, but I would hazard a guess that using a open source viewer and file format would pretty much aleviate this problem.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
How about Slashdot TV! 24 hour Nerd News.
Slashdot effect the world!
~-~
Anonymous Coward - The one and only
Of course, the Freenet routing protocol is a bit iffy right now, but when it works, it's pretty cool.
The idea of streaming across Freenet's infrastructure has been done before. Who needs a grassroots TV network when you can have a grassroots, anonymous, encrypted TV network?
The other side-effect of Freenet's architecture is that popular data persists. You might be able to retrieve a show from days or weeks ago, if enough nodes watched it in the first place.
For the moment, performance limits it to audio streams, but video might be workable in the near future. The dev team can always use more bright minds. Are you free?
Fine, but a lot of people actually like the non-streamlined, one file at a time nature of BT. The core ideas of bittorent seed/peers have been implemented by other programs for a while. Ares uses incomplete files, and does a pretty good job at transfers too.
What separates BT from the rest is the nature of the transmission. BT bases transfers in a single file, and that file is just about always the file you really want. Go to kazaa, and you'll either get a fake (RIAA), a fake(different file), or the real thing with a virus. Bittorrent isn't really so hard, I've successfully helped 1 out 3 kids at my school... and that's without being next to a computer.
If I could ask for one improvement for steamlining BT... I'd ask the _nova_ to place a prominent link to bittornado on their main page. Other than that, it's easier than opening a word doc.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Fear of copyright liability and the power of the DMCA are what is stopping the distribution of any media/entertainment contents via p2p network.
THe RIAA/MPAA has already put the fear of the Copyright Satan into the hearts of any potential entrepreneurs and it will be a long time before we see anything like a p2p television network on the Internet.
Have a network of members and affiliates who all shoulder the cost, donations go to the pool and appropiated by a commitee/board to fund different projects and shows. This way you could have a world community, that drills down to a national community, that can still drill down to a local community, mix and match the international shows with the national and local.
Now show me how you'd make "Farscape" or "The Practice" or "Survivor" with this kind of distribution model, where the very nature of the model (the content is available because it doesn't cost lots of people anything to grab it and keep it sitting around on their hard disks) means you have to resort to in-show product placements or "please send us money" captions to recoup any of your production costs. Worse, every one of your legitimate viewers is required to have, and know how to use, the exact tool that enables them to easily get a pirated copy of your show!
In addition, even if you pay for your production with a loan or an investor or whatever, you have to have a heck of a lot of viewers paying you before you can break even. Even at the ridiculously high price of $10 an episode, you'd need over 100,000 paying customers to pay for any but the cheapest modern science-fiction shows -- and you'd need to get them quickly enough so as not to run out of money making new episodes before reaching critical mass. That's a pretty sizable marketing challenge, to say the least, especially when you're competing for that $10 with twenty other shows!
You might conceivably be able to make this work with some kind of subscription model that covers multiple shows, a la HBO, if you had strong enough DRM to keep people from converting your content to DiVX and posting it to Suprnova ten minutes after you released it. But HBO didn't start producing original content in any significant quantity until it had been around for a while and had already built up a sizable customer base. They also have a lineup of content (movies) to keep people sending them money when they aren't showing their original stuff.
I hope I'm wrong! I'd love to be able to vote with my wallet. I buy shows on DVD and I'd be perfectly willing -- eager, even -- to spend the same amount of money on DVDs of brand-new episodes instead of old ones. But I just don't see how you get the initial critical mass you need to make it pay for itself.
from TFA: Mark Pesce lives in Sydney, hoping against hope that Bush goes down in flames this November
AND he teaches people how to have their own TV station?
once someone from the NSA happpens to RTFA, this dude is toast.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- G.B. Shaw
I saw UHF, and I'm ready. Seriously, who wants to start up a outlaw TV broadcast channel?
God spoke to me:
www.geocities.com/James_Sager_PA
God spoke to me
I will be honest that I did not read the article, but from just reading the blurb, it sounds like it's just 'TV Programs' being distributed on p2p networks, or in this bittorrent. Last time I checked, Red vs. Blue is already doing this by cycling their episodes from week to week to conserve bandwidth. Perhaps someone could correct me on this but I was just thinking this is already being done...
Can some one shed some Light on the BBC's Flexible TV?
Wanted : A Signature.
the idea for a p2p distribution for a show occured to me, after obtaining on a regular basis, within 24 hours of broadcast, each consecutive episode of g4tech tv's screen savers. I thought that it was great, that i could simply download at my leisure the episodes of one particular program without being at the mercy of broadcasting network and it's advertisements.. for the first while i was still having to watch random american ads, for places that were no where to be found in NZ. Then who ever was posting these on suprnova removed the ads from the avi file. I love that person, whoever they are.
Anyways, after doing this for a while, i thought hey, that would surely be a good way to distribute a low budget show, perhaps something along the lines of a d.i.y car show, or geek show, etc.. and potentially, (for a while at least) a way around my local broadcasting standards act... It also allows for the possibilty of viewer participation, in that people from across the globe could send thier DV files to me, and i could ad them to the show..
the problems arise in these areas... 1) bandwidth.. im limited to 10gb a month up/down at 1mbit a sec. I could however simply host the torrent files on a website, and run an instance of say emule with the current episode hosted.
2) this is the biggie, CONTENT.. i had figured that if i kept episodes to 15 mins i could keep content up to par with quality. plus your attention spans wouldn't wane too much... but how on earth do you keep regular content flowing on a $0 budget? my answer would be dedication, and help from the viewing community, once established. but it's still a hurdle.
and 3) who says it's not going to cause all sorts of legal headaches.. if you don't know any better, say something out of line, or say something negative about a company or product, could you afford the legal bills?
i am glad to see this on slashdot, yet sad that i know i won't be a pioneer untill i can get my stuff sorted. and of course someone will beat me to it..
There's already several companies that do P2P video streaming. I have beta tested for one called NFT-TV several times in the past. It seems to work pretty well with ~100 users online. Unfortunatly its a closed souce commercial application. All of the ones I have read about including NFT-TV are using custom designed networks.
The obvious answer to my mind is bloggers.
Imagine getting your news not from CNN / Fox, but instead actually from someone on the ground living in an apartment in Baghdad while it's being bombed?
Get news reports on SCO vs Everyone not just from the media and court filings, but actually see image of the court building where it's all happening with bloggers telling us how they think the proceedings are going at the moment.
Blogging is the news network of tomorrow, and this is how it will be done.
I've seen some of the short films that AFTRS students produce, and they are world class productions. Really brilliant.
Simon.
The other side to your argument is that producing a show with the special effects of farscape, etc doesn't HAVE to cost a million dollars, it merely does with current techniques/business bureacracy.
At this level, I would like to think that ideas matter much more than production quality. Given a $100M budget for a movie, it seems like things like plot and character development can be done away with entirely. But anyone who has seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail knows that great things can be done on a shoestring budget. Give me a camcorder and two halves of a coconut to bang together, and I can move the world.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
TV broadcasts are for the most part reliable, do not suffer from bandwidth issues the way a P2P network does, and are not new legally ambiguous technology. Why on Earth would you want to take something reliable and rework it over an unsuitable and unreliable framework? What does it offer the end user? At present you don't pay for TV by bandwidth, whereas you do pay for internet access that way. This simply doesn't offer the end user any clear advantages and has a number of disadvantages.
Yes you can use a hammer as a hacksaw, but unless you're desperate it'd be insane. So yes you could use your internet connection in place of TV, but why would you?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I think you would have to distribute your content for free, and make up the costs through licensing of products and product placement.
What, me worry?
But how the hell do I make a living doing this? I am getting into independent video production and have a couple documentary ideas in the works. If I just released them into the wild like this I'd be done real quick.
I don't understand. I thought freecache took care of this, if I took care of the content and permissions, and it was archived material (not real time).
you just blew my mind man!
A few dedicated volunteers can produce a printer driver or a talking calculator or maybe even a low-rent word processor out of pocket. This is potentially a great way for that kind of content to get distributed -- content that costs basically nothing to create, and that the creators are doing as a labor of love rather than as their day jobs.
Now show me how you'd make "MS Office" or "Internet Explorer" or "Windows" with this kind of distribution model...
BitTorrent distributes small files in a central, regulated, non-p2p manner which contain cryptographic hashes of the blocks of the file. As such, it is computationally infeasible to replace any part of the file with another one. BitTorrent is a p2p download client. It is not a p2p file sharing network. As such it is not plagued by the sorts of problems which arise in p2p file sharing networks.
This sounds an awful lot like Kast/Konspire2b. Basically, "channel" owners broadcast out a file (of any type) to others who in turn broadcast it to others and so on. Everything posted to a channel is downloaded by a subscriber to that channel (provided they are online). Sadly this fairly novel project seems to have died off, much like the original Konspire, which was also fairly novel.
Good buddy, I often download from BitTorrent just as fast as I download from legit sites.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
What about DV Guide?
It even RSS distribute torrent files in the enclosure tag. Concept here
Considering that most shows about entertainment are simply ADVERTISEMENTS for movies and music, why is it so unimaginable that they should support such programming? It's inevitable, even if the hotown suits won't yet concede this fact. What needs to be done is simply for someone to make the effort to produce enough "free" content to build an audience.
Since we're talking about geeky stuff atm, it doesn't seem to me so unimaginable at all. I regularly get announcements in my mailbox from (for example) National semiconductor, who have now started producing programs featuring Bob Pease, a well known engineer and curmudgeon - a "personality." What about making some video features linux advocates could share with others? Features like "how to install mandrake on your pc" and "how to produce video" and "how to program in python." There are companies making a living producing this content for sale, so there's obviously an audience. it would be trivially easy to tie these type features in with product placements, which means it should be fairly easy to attract sponsorship dollars once a few shows have proven their merit via torrential "ratings" - which should also be fairly easy to produce with the proper oss infrastructure, given at least one company presently gets paid big bucks by mainstream hollywood to provide exactly this service.
how about computer generated everything? no actors, no salaries to pay, do it yourself. Not much cost to recoup is there?
:)
*THAT* could mean the end of the old film industry
"So what is stopping anyone from doing this now?
Awareness of the concept, perhaps?
Probably half the reason right here. You have to know how not only have to know it's possible, but how it's possible. It's rarily as simple to setup as how it sounds.
Lack of broadband connections?
Given the fact that bit-torrent, an inherantly highbandwidth product has taken off, I doubt it. not everybody has a broadband connection, though it's hardly unheard of either.
Lack of business models for content producers?
Again, there's plenty of opportunity and room here, so I can't see this as being a factor either. Penny Arcade comes to mind. Mega Tokyo? Hell, Slashdot, even. The media might be slightly different, but in the end it comes down to just how creative are you?
Since we're out of story bullets, I'll submit my own-- Lack of proper equipment/tools. Let's face it, while you can go out and create a movie on your web cam or something similar, it's going to have to be way above average in some other area to compensate for that. Likewise, editing tools, software, etc. Assuming you're not looking to pirate your utilities, none of that is cheap, let alone a proper recording device. We're talking a serious finacial commitment here. Even great ideas need good presentation.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Maybe this will lead to better TV shows instead of having to watch reality TV all the time.
http://www.techsupportforum.com
We may have to consider different distribution models anyway.
http://rantmedia.ca/ already does this, with their interesting and informative Patrolling internet TV series. You can also see them on Winamps streaming TV, if you search for rant. I hope more people follow in their example and put out internet television that is both entertaining and informative.
I have this already. I have a list of RSS feeds in my BitTorrent client with regular expressions, and everyday when I get home, all the shows I want to watch that have aired are waiting for me. If someone offered better reliability, and per-show pricing, I'd pay in a heartbeat.
A pilot has one chance to make a good impression. If the casting is wrong or the sets and visuals are second-rate, a promising backstory, some fresh sci-fi gimmicks and a credible script will not be enough to save you. In a perfect world it wouldn't take millions to get this far. But there is only so much you can do on the cheap.
The problem with the internet is that there is TOO MUCH content and not a good enough way to find what you are looking for.
That's exactly why search engines like Google and Yahoo are the most popular fixtures of the internet.
The choice is overwhelming. Information overload.
The reason Kazaa became the most popular P2P engine out there had to have something to do with its categorization engine, something that is missing from most P2P applications. Filename alone tells you very little about content.
However, then people start categorizing content improperly/incompletely and you are still in trouble.
There is a convenience in consuming content from reliable commercial sources. You can trust that you are getting what you think you are. When I buy a song from iTunes or a DVD I know I'm not going to have any surprises. When I get something off of a P2P network I have less trust that the description matches the content. Even if real content is injected into the P2P network from people like the BBC that doesn't mean it can't be obscured by malicious individuals.
In fact the categorization can be used as a trojan to get attention. New album from Velvet Revolver coming out, right? Are you a struggling band looking for attention? Put your album on Kazaa using the names of the songs from the Velvet Revolver album and bingo, millions of people will wind up hearing your music!!! This kind of intentional mislabeling is a HUGE problem right now on P2P networks.
The problem with integrity ratings is that they are bound to the file, but what does someone do when they realize they downloaded a bogus file? Do they drop the integrity rating and leave it up for sharing? No, they immediately delete it. So the fact that the file is bogus doesn't propagate. Meanwhile the file still circulates like a virus because people still think it's genuine.
This is a critical piece that needs to get solved within the P2P domain.
The solution seems to be moving towards using hashes and special links (magnet, etc...) on database-driven websites as a way to separate things. But then you are at least in part moving BACK to a central server rather than a P2P model. You still need an authoritative website as a search engine and authenticator. And these sites are getting shut down by the RIAA/MPAA faster than they can go up so this is not a long-term solution.
Not only that, but as for news and political viewpoints, the problem is again too much diversity of opinion. There are billions of people on this planet and I simply have no desire to hear all of their opinions all at once like some kind of Godlike psychic. Journalism as we know it dies, to be replaced by individual opinions masquerading as journalism. Opinions are nice, but everyone's got one and not everyone's worth listing to. So you don't trust Fox News? I'm not sure an unabashedly liberal outlet is any more unbiased. On the net you NEVER know who to take seriously because there are no fact checkers, no regulations, nothing. Anyone can say whatever they want. It's the perfect environment for some kind of Orson Welles War of the Worlds type hoax.
You know, I've actually seen some UFO clips on Kazaa. How the heck do we know if they are real or not? Where is the context? Where did they come from? These things are disassociated from context.
I simply can not see this as a purely positive development in mass media. For these reasons, there are serious drawbacks!
Easy way to incorporate a LIVE broadcast - and not just a recorded broadcast - is to use the bittorrent p2p structure for a "live" - 1-2 minute delay? - broadcast.
The p2p application and media player are all one application; as it downloads it plays.
So what is stopping anyone from doing this now?
I'll tell you what's stopping it, at least for college students: Paranoid universities that block darned near every port except 81, rendering Bittorrent totally useless. Anyone have any workaround ideas for that?
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
The tracker can be more efficent, but in order to reach anywhere near that kind of real efficency, it would need more information than it actually has.
Firstly, it can only make educated guesses at the available bandwidth of the nodes. Nodes will lie/cheat/steal in order to get more packets, and you can't trust the clients. They're greedy.
Secondly, it doesn't really know the network topology. Again, you're only able to make educated guesses. If my neighbor and me are on the same torrent, then ideally the tracker would be able to tell us about each other, we'd connect, and share at very high speeds, being that we're both close to each other and on the same subnet and such. That case might be easy to recognize, sometimes, not so easy other times. Without full knowledge of the whole network, it's impossible to do perfectly in any case.
Third, even with the most efficent possible tracker, the grandparent is right. You have X users downloading, and they all are downloading Y bits of data. All data transfer is point to point, meaning that X*Y bits of data must be sent out for everybody to get the complete file. For every byte downloaded, there's a byte uploaded. You can make that fast by maximizing your throughput and managing it all into small sub-networks, but it still doesn't scale to everybody in the world.
A multicast setup does scale, even if it is a pain in the ass to do right now. One byte sent out from the source gets duplicated for each branch in the routing tree, and all users receive it. Upload rate is constant. If you ignore new users joining and old users leaving, traffic along each branch in the tree is only one copy of the stream, all the way until it reaches the endpoints (the viewers).
The problem with multicast is that it's confusing as hell because it requires cooperation of all the routers to handle the multicast traffic appropriately. But for any single source to many receivers, it's easily the most efficent way to do things.
And let's not forget that while torrent trackers *could* be more efficent, they are quite simply not that efficent. The torrent network is often highly connected instead of sparsely connected. Especially on larger files. A sparser network would be more optimal (read as: faster) in extremely large torrents, but it is rarely the case currently.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Of course it's difficult to produce high quality content, but you don't have to do that!
The studios are the content producers, not the networks. Networks are all about distribution and a p2p network is the same, but with a much more powerful medium.
Currently, the Studios produce content for their customers, the networks. The networks decide what to put on the air and pay the studios to produce it, but it doesn't have to work that way.
Studios could produce pilots, release them directly to the p2p Networks and Users can vote on which shows to develop.
The business model is simple subscription. People have paid for specific channels since premuim cable came out in the 80's, but now they could subscribe to individual shows. The p2p Network could make available the first few episodes at no charge and the studios and network would share advertising and royalties.
I think this is one of many possibilites and a lot of you are approching this as "how do we make TV work using P2P." You *should* be thinking about how the concepts of TV and P2P can be merged to create something better. The internet is a more powerful network and it's OK to do things differently.
It's a clever idea, but current protocols wouldn't work at all, including bittorrent.
The moment that there's any kind of money or power (even social power) involved, there's a huge incentive for people to hack the system. Unless you're willing to wait for an entire 30? 60? 90? 120? minute broadcast to complete and be hash-verified against authenticated sources, you're going to have people who connect directly to the source and substitute their own (forged / humorous / slanderous / obscene) content in place of the actual broadcast.
In order for something like this to work, you'd need some method for clients to verify that the content they've received (and passed on!) is the content that the original source sent. And bang! You're right back to single points of failure and the slashdot effect. Sure, it's better to validate a hash than get a whole block, but it's still tough.
Not to say that it can't be done, but I don't believe it can be done in the current bittorrent distribution model for streaming content. I'd welcome correction on that, of course.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Now, I have nothing against those people how advocate this sort of path. I'm all for it. But at this point we're pretty well past the point of sitting around and talking about it. It's time to do it if you're gonna do it. The technology is pretty much all in place. It's just a matter of putting everything together.
That's why I'm actually running my own video blog (which isn't very impressive at the moment as my camera broke and I haven't bought a new one yet, but don't worry: it'll get better soon). The difference between a video blog and a full TV station is just a question of scale.
Ideally we want RSS and BitTorrent together. Right now there are two clients which do this: 1) Torrentocracy, a mythTV plugin and 2) Buttress, a java application. They're not precisely equivalent, but they both serve the same basic function. So, if you want to consume video, get one of those.
If you want to serve it, get BitTorrent, set up a tracker, and start a blog with torrent enclosures. I think that some of the pay blogging tools support this (Radio and Moveable Type I believe both support it with some plugin). But an even cheaper way to do this is to go get Blosxom, a free, open source blogging tool written in perl, and get the plugin which Dave Slusher and I wrote to allow you to do enclosures in RSS feeds created using Blosxom. Then, bam, you're in the video broadcast business.
All the links you might need for this (except if you want to use Radio or Moveable Type because I really don't know a thing about them) can be found on my homepage at http://www.asyserver.com/~kirwin/.
This is the time to begin TV democracy. There's no point in waiting and debating.
Keith Irwin
I've mentioned this on Slashdot before, a few times, but this type of thing is a good candidate for educational programming, not the news.
If someone (PBS?) could release all of their educational content under a non-restrictive license then I'd happily pay for the dedicated servers to host and track the torrents. Math, History and Science programs would get even the adults involved but would be a great resource for people who are home-schooling or parents who want to keep their children occupied when home sick from school.
I don't know why we, Americans, have not done this already. I suspect that bandwidth is an issue but that is somewhat silly as it is otherwise wasted on illegal downloads and that sort of thing.
There should be a public education page that acts as an entry point for materials for students and teachers alike. Think "cable in the classroom" turned into "internet in the classroom". Why haven't a few public school teachers already gotten together and made this a reality? 30 minute shows aren't that hard to make. Take your lesson plan and turn that into a script. Read it, or hire someone to and viola.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I'm actually running my own RSS + BT video blog (which isn't very impressive at the moment as my camera broke and I haven't bought a new one yet, but don't worry: it'll get better soon). The difference between a video blog and a full TV station is just a question of scale.
Right now there are two RSS + BT clients: 1) Torrentocracy, a mythTV plugin and 2) Buttress, a java application. They're not precisely equivalent, but they both serve the same basic function. So, if you want to consume video, get one of those.
If you want to serve it, get BitTorrent, set up a tracker, and start a blog with torrent enclosures. I think that some of the pay blogging tools support this (Radio and Moveable Type I believe both support it with some plugin). But an even cheaper way to do this is to go get Blosxom, a free, open source blogging tool written in perl, and get the plugin which Dave Slusher and I wrote to allow you to do enclosures in RSS feeds created using Blosxom. Then, bam, you're in the video broadcast business.
All the links you might need for this (except if you want to use Radio or Moveable Type because I really don't know a thing about them) can be found on my homepage at http://www.asyserver.com/~kirwin/.
This is the time to begin TV democracy. There's no point in waiting and debating.
Keith Irwin
You know the first generation of this technology is already out there. It uses various content providers to distribute material to a user's secure client. The clients also share amongst themselves as well to speed up distribution (blatant bittorrent cribbing on their part). Everything is encrypted, so nobody can access content without paying for it or access preloaded content early.
I can't remember the company's name, but they're some small developer in the northwest states. They want to distribute everything from video on demand to video games over this thing. They have some little content their touting as "major" that they want to distribute over their network soon (hl2 or something). Whatever. Sounds like a load of steam to me.
They seem to have focused specifically on the mass distribution issues (some analysis here)and attempted to address those.
Their own webpages are a little light on content and mostly aimed at helping out the Beta testers, but more useful information can be found on various sites.
iMP is P2P client that allows distribution of BBC programmes. There is a DRM component that stops a programme being watched 7 days after downloading. iMP is a great idea for the BBC as it has the potential to significantly reduce the infrastructure costs in terms of streaming and network bandwidth required. A big question for me though is how robust their DRM technology will prove to be.
Brought to you by the author of such childrens' classics as "Some Kittens can Fly!" and "All Dogs go to Hell."
Good timing: i'm 12 hours away from releasing an announcment to a true p2p television network. if anyone is interested in helping test out, you can email me ashod at apakian com
and one i had a couple of years ago as i was involved in a filmmaking crowd. some people are trying to make professional amature shows with a view to using them as experience and a stepping stone into the industry
My friend is an actor in the internet soap Chalkhill Lives which is run as a kind of consortium, all the actors and crew pay into it which pays for the hire of a house tapes, consumables, hosting etc. And everybody takes a turn directing, filming and writing.
you'll need quicktime to view the epsiodes.
Think about it: when do you really need a live broadcast? Only when you want viewers to phone in.
TV over BT would and should work like TiVo et al (or good old VCR) are already working: you go through the online TV guide (.torrent files provided via RSS), select what you would like to watch, the client downloads it and you later watch it.
just because someone's come up with a (theoretical) way to send video around does not make it a television network. how 'bout just calling it a video network? or (if they somehow manage to make it streaming, which most P2P things (like bittorrent) are not, streaming video? let's get imaginative here. they didn't call "television" "picture radio".
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
The problem is that many people have asymmetrical DSL and thus have a shitty upload rate which is important for any p2p on a greater scale (You cannot download more than up (without multicast)).
Move Sig. For great justice.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail came in at about $250,000 USD (1975) Business Data for Monty Python and the Holy Grail . That is still a lot of money to raise for what is essentially an extended theatrical sketch.
The Indymedia Video network projectl e_ivdn.htm
http://www.plugincinema.com/plugin/articles/artic
and
our plugin Free Film Projectp ffp.htm
http://www.plugincinema.com/plugin/plugin_cinema/
My Personal Blog on Games and Technology and More
Here in Germany it tooks months to years until current US TV series show up (always in a dubbed version). No Stargate Atlantis, Dead Like Me, 4400 so far. Remember the David Hasselhoff jokes here on /.
From this point of view it is more the half way using Bittorrent.
Is that already supported by the protocol?
Since lack of bandwidth seems to be the cause of winamp/real internet radio/tv hickups/buffering,
maybe distributing the workload among many p2p users
will increase broadcast quality.
The advantage is clear: you don't need to wait for the 4.6+GB DVD-rip file to finish downloading, you contribute to the infrastructure by just watching it.
Why not?
Because it can be done.
To let more voices be heard.
To let non-"Fair and Balanced" voices be heard.
To pressure the "real" networks with some competition they have never seen before.
As stated in other places, but to sum up:
Making quality visual content is not cheap and easy. It's MUCH harder than just writing a blog page, or pirating together a radio broadcast from your MP3 collection. Sure the tools make it theoretically easy, but the actual creative componant of making half an hour of something people really want to watch is daunting - this coming from someone who spent years doing it for "the man".
So in order for something like this to work, you need money. Thus, there has to be SOME sort of a business model, and I for one don't think the Public Radio Pledge Drive/paypal donate model is going to work here.
So if you spend money making good content, with the hopes of at least making a little money, guess what folks - DRM. Sorry, but it's true. You are actually going to have to pay for it.
All the comments about bandwidth are also true.
Look how much time and energy goes into making something like Red v. Blue - with no live video at all, and how short and simple it has to be. And call me a cynic, but I don't think those guys are rolling in dough, even with my paltry donation.
Winamp's Internet TV is a new way to watch TV online, anyone can run their own station, as long as they have the bandwidth anyway. It's not p2p, mainly due to lack of workable technology and most people's broadband connections being too slow to adequatly relay, but it does work quite well. There are many stations that broadcast everything from cartoons, technology, politics, music, and more showing up all the time. Linux users can watch with mplayer.
Popular Stations
FreedomTV - http://www.freedom-tv.net/
RantTV - http://www.ranttv.com/
MytherilTV - http://www.conjure.biz/
Since I started downloading a lot of anime, I've almost completely stopped watching regular TV. I keep my computer at home on all the time and start downloads on it from work with VNC, which gets me more than enough programming to watch, probably way too much actually. Anyway, to me the main thing that would make this process easier would be a bittorrent client that could subscribe to a regularly released series so I don't have to keep checking sites for the latest torrent. This could be an enhancement to the regular bittorrent server, where the server offers a number of subscriptions. If your bittorrent client registers with the server as a subscriber, the torrent server would send you the torrent file whenever a new release becomes available. This makes bittorrent servers into subscription servers with a relatively minor enhancement, and suddenly bittorrent is working like TIVO.
http://tvtorrents.net/
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