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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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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.
'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...
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
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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
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/
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.
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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.
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.
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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
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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.)
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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.)
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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?
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.
Can some one shed some Light on the BBC's Flexible TV?
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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