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?"

Comments

Well, i did this. RSS + Bittorrent

[thenightisdark]

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.

My first question was, 'why'?

[TiggertheMad]

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?

From the standpoint of news broadcasting, this could be really big, though. Set up a /. 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...

Torrentocracy

[lerhaupt]

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.

Re:They are doing it... illegally

[Black Acid]

Whenever a new episode of Stargate comes out a bittorrent streams it live as it is created...

Is this possible with BT considering that it sends out blocks in a non-sequential order and the .torrent file contains SHA-1 hashes of the blocks? eDonkey sends out blocks in random order, as well, in order to optimize against the rare missing block problem. I think this is a good optimization to take, especially on file distribution networks, but it sacrifices the ability to stream (as far as I know). Anyone know any more about this?