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.
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
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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.
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
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.
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.
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*...
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?
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
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?
Wanted : A Signature.
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!