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Peercasting Ready for Primetime?
ZephyrXero writes "Have you ever wanted to run your own internet radio or TV station, but
thought the bandwidth would cost too much? While Wired
thinks Peer-to-peer broadcasting, or "peercasting", will be the future
of the internet (previously
posted); Peercast.org
says it's already here today. Peercast's software is available for Linux,
Windows, and Mac. You can
broadcast both audio and video without needing a whole lot of bandwidth
since each audience member also uploads back to the network. The Xiph Foundation
is also working on a similar project called "IceShare,"
but it's still in planning. Peercast,
still in beta seems to already be fully functional and ready for an audience (even you dial-up guys)."
How is this any different from the normal Bittorrent clients? Simply more user-friendly, and easier to setup trackers and such?
Yet Another Multimedia Package?
Winamp, windows media player, real audio/video, quicktime, divx, xvid, itunes, etc etc.
Why am I not excited to install yet another multimedia package on my pc?
So if I do this, will the FCC come knocking on my door?
One may also want to check out Mercora
-dk
We're all t.v. networks now.
If I were a major media executive I would be seriously worried about my businiess model.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
Unlucky - I beat you to it :o)
I would guess that the TV networks would try to stomp this and hard.
Why?
Protection of an already diluted market.
Over the last 10 years, they've been hammered by Cable, Sattelite TV, and now BitTorrent. Appointment TV is dying.
Now comes another technology designed to possibly make it so you can watch any show at any time. The more who watch, the more who are able to watch.
The TV Networks SHOULD be the ones leading this charge.
But they won't, because they can't imagine anything outside of the current "Must See TV" trap that's locked them in over the past decades.
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Is this the protocol posted on /. a few weeks ago, that was like bittorrent, but let you transfer thing sequentially, so you could watch/seek in movies as they're transferring?
As for revolutionizing the world, I think TFA is getting ahead of itself. I don't care about Jimbo Q Nobody's online diary (I don't use the b word because it sounds retarded), and I can safely say I don't care to listen to his CD collection.
Too bad copyright law WRT radio and television broadcasts is such a mess. How cool would it be if every online TiVo was/had a P2P client? Forgot to tape Simpsons? Download it from the tivo-net.
Oh well, fuckit. Peercasting is DOA, there's no worthwhile content.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
My web galerie contains loads of music that people are often reluctant to downlaod and try, I guess I'll soon be running such a "radio" so that anybody might try these audio works easily.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Funny.. the site says the OS X version requires no installation.. but somehow the download starts an installer and even requires me to reboot. Uhhu
I'm trying to use peercast right now.
Every "station" has 0 listeners and 0 relayers, save two or three japanese ones.
Yeah, sound's like the next big thing for bloggers. Another way to "express yourself" without anyone ever seeing or hearing.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If the paradigm really pays off, the upload bandwidth for heavy users may become significant. The reward for defecting from the contract will increase. Remember that at one time no one would think of sponging off the Internet to mass mail a commercial message (Horrors!) and the first ones to do so were roundly excoriated.
The advantage here is that there may be valuable mitigating strategies (For example, blessed client binaries with authentication keys built in, with a checkbox to only upload to authorized clients is one possibility). The question in my mind is, will parasitism be an inconvenience(like email spam), a pain in the ass (like worms/trojans requiring active efforts to suppress), or virtually debilitating (as it is on Usenet)?
It will depend on a lot of factors, including the growth and shape of the torrent-style community (how many uploaders/downloaders/freeloaders), the cost of the upload streams for those that will end up having to pay for extra bandwidth, etc.
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
A community could also run sites like Slashdot with everybody sharing the bandwidth. That might mean no ads, no dependency on a single corporation, everybody can participate in selecting stories, setting "locality" - browsing stories scored by an interest group a reader belongs to, by a group close geographically, or with the score averaged globally.
I'm curious to know how "peercasting" and peer-to-peer softwares change the network bandwidth usage for a country or across geos.
Currently, even though the internet is supposed to be a decentralized network, it's still built with old network usage patterns in mind. Bandwidth is allocated accordingly as well.
I think that along with P2P network usage, wireless usage (WiMax, for example) will also change the bandwidth usage pattern.
Although i'm not a network designer by any means, i would still be very interested to know how the network designs of the future would look like, and the kinds of bottlenecks one would face in the future, if still connected to the older networks.
While I'm sure everyone is ready to scream "it's the age of the one man TV Station!", we may not be entirely there just yet.
Media distribution is a technological problem, and there for inenvitably solvable.
But content is not. It still takes Talent, Money and Training (or 2 of the 3:) to produce content on the level that people expect. You can look to modern day BLOGs as a paradime. Everybody and his brother has a BLOG, but how many of them have regular readers? Only a few people have the tallent to write anything that the rest of us care to read.
The situation is made worse with a peercast network because:
1) you need the tallent
2) You need a host of OTHER people with tallent (say actors)
3) You need people to watch it. Lot's of people, a traditional BLOG doesn't require ramp up, to scale. But you need a following to get a following. Chicken and the egg.
Until problems like "Bad Actors" get solved it may be some time before peercasts acomplish anything more than syndicating otherpeoples (read comercial/stolen/porn) media.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Its great that this technology exists, i had the same idea about 2 years ago and wanted to develop it but i never had enough C++ knowledge. :)
Atleast now i can start my own TV station
So, I download on my 1.45Mbps stream, and my outgoing is set to 128KBps. The guy who gets connected to me is going to be really hosed....
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
...when they have compelling content. Its all about the content, nothing about technology.
If they aren't webcasting the macworld keynote due to extra expense, maybe they should consider a peercast of it. Save on lots of bandwidth, still get the free advertising. I see it as a win-win situation.
Honestly, I don't think someone is going to go to macworld simply because they can't see a live stream of the keynote, so I don't believe the argument that they got rid of streaming to increase attendance...
Maybe they should p2p their web site. It's already down.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
I just downloaded the client accepted the mime to use peercast://x. I get a system tray icon that keeps a list of the stations I click on. When I select play (on XPSP2) it opens my dvd playing software with an attempt to run "Aspi.log" in my root dir. Just for the fun of it I tried to let it run and nothing happens...
Seemed like a straight forward install all went well according to the app, will try again!
But seriously I have a funny feeling that this is gonna get really big, especially when it gets to video.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Software like this raises an interesting question, where is the talent?
I'm running Firefox, a free browser created from donated talent on the internet,(and occasionally funded & used as a testing ground for new stuff by corporations.)
I read my email with Thunderbird, a free client created from donated talent on the internet,(and occasionally funded & used as a testing ground for new stuff by corporations.)
I write documents with OpenOffice.org, a free office sutie created from donated talent on the internet (and occasionally funded & used as a testing ground for new stuff by corporations.)
Why is there so little entertainment produced this way? There are people out there with free time and talent. There are media companies with spare cash who don't want to spend jillions hyping a sitcom with a theme that will flop. Or is it just a matter of time?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Netcraft confirms it.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
``"Have you ever wanted to run your own internet radio or TV station, but thought the bandwidth would cost too much?''
Yes. That's why I started to write streamdist. One person starts serving a stream, then everyone who connects distributes it to the next person. I made it work for Ogg Vorbis files, but then I lost interest and moved on. I guess peercast is similar.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Y'know, they're pretty picky about net broadcast fees. Exactly how are they going to bill people? And exactly who will be billed?
I'm all for this, don't get me wrong. But like any good idea that promotes the *AA's products, moron music execs will be all over it since it bypasses one of their revenue models.
Enjoy it for now, because it's probably going away soon.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I don't know Peercast (which seems oriented toward "radio" type uses), but I can comment about my app, Andromeda.
Essentially, the question is: you've got your collection of files, now what?
As for Andromeda, it turns your collection into a browsable, streaming Web site (mostly used with MP3s, though you can use it with OGG, Real, etc.)
(You need a PHP or ASP capable Web server)
It's more of an "on-demand" approach (rather than "radio") -- you decide what you want to play. And since it's Web based, you don't have to bother toting physical stuff around or installing special client apps -- it all happens over the network (Internet or LAN).
When it comes to personal collections, those are generally kept to private use, but "sharable" works (ie, Creative Commons, or if you're the author) can be put on public sites.
In other words, it's not about YAMP, it's about what you do with what you've got.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
These guys already patented it... ages ago.
More, importantly, does this mean we can get a live feed from the MacWorld Keynote tomorrow?
=)
- Tony
Anybody feel like setting up a peercast of the MacWorld keynote tomorrow? You will be my God if you do....
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Bandwidth is incredibly cheap - I'm not sure how necessary this is. Bought in bulk (20, 50, 100mbps) from a hosting facility, bandwidth is cheap enough for all but the most amateur of users to send a single stream up to the hosted server and distribute from there... perhaps to multiple boxes that then split the stream further.
I think this is a technology in search of a purpose rather than real-world problem solving.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Does anyone know whether this is patented? This sounds like the kind of thing that Peercast or some other company probably attempted to slap a stupid software patent on. Obviously we in the geek community could name plenty of prior art based on non media data replication, but this sounds like something the proprietary software scumbags of the world would have rushed to grab a patent on.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Most Internet radio that makes money on its ads SUCKS. But still pays for its bandwidth.
I don't want to listen to suck.
So if you think that you're good enough that you should add another channel to the thousands available, go for it, and make it pay for itself.
If it doesn't, that's a clue that it SUCKS SO BAD that you really shouldn't bother.
(btw, the walrus was paul; dig it)
ASCAP will be knocking on your door. Shortly after I graduated from College I was running a little radio station on the Internet. It was a 28Kbps RealAudio stream and I had maybe 4 listeners at my peak. None the less, AASCAP sent me a letter demanding that I cease broadcasting, or license my broadcast through them.
For a non-profit station they had a flat rate of something like $250/year. I suppose that's not that terrible, but since I wasn't making any money at all on the venture ~$20/month seemed a little steep to me. If you have any sort of revenue, they will charge you more based on your revenue.
If you want to do audio casting, I'd recommend Live365 instead. Because they volume license, the rates that you ultimately pay to ASCAP are lower than you'd end up paying on your own. One argument for using them, bandwidth considerations, seems to be fading, but it's definitely worth it just to avoid the legal hassle if your a hobbyist.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Unless the event must be live and not delayed by even an few hours, bittorrent is far superior in my view. It uses the same bandwidth but allows you to watch the stuff when you want to and you get a copy on your computer.
Broadcasting is a relic from when technology made on demand downloading impractical. The internet can just as easily do on demand as broadcast, so why cripple yourself?
I was doing this years ago so that I could listen to my favorite talk show out of DC wherever I went, with Shoutcast. Limiting it to three connections helped :)
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
But you can think of P2P broadcasting as a way of eliminating, or at least minimizing, the "money" requirement. It has the potential to lower (though probably not destroy) the barriers to entry into the media.
Your point about blogs is a good one. 90% of them are really not worth reading, and most of the rest are just barely interesting. But the .01% that are really extraordinary only came about because there is almost no barrier to entry. "Everybody and his brother" can get a blog. Those truly extraordinary bloggers would probably never have been heard if it weren't for that fact.
So my point is that while talent and training still take money (as demonstrated with the usually horrible graphics in open-source games), any way to ease the difficulty of producing and distributing media will allow that many more unforeseen and creative bits of content get through. Even if only a few quality streams come out of this technology, it will be a few more than we have right now.
Of course, one of the big potential uses for this is in the amateur ("I've got a webcam and will perform in front of it") sexual video arena. Though at the moment the software looks like it is probably aimed at single broadcast/multiple watchers, if it became a true peer-to-peer network it could be a Very Big Thing Indeed since it does not rely on a single entity (corporation) hosting a central (such as yahoo or webcamnow or camarades) server.
Let the ("heh, heh, heh") games begin!
The whole *point* of IP multicasting is to allow the network to perform data replication, etc, so that an individual can send data to n receivers without having to transmit n copies of the stream. Too bad, much like IPv6, no one seems to want to support it.
This sounds like an interesting use of P2P networking. But, it makes your broadcast very non-deterministic. Listeners will get a decent experience iff several factors are correct.
Multicasting would be a much better solution for IP broadcasting, and it has been around for a long time. But, it has never really hit prime time. With multicasting, you need only enough bandwidth for your stream. It is passed through the internet as needed - as users connect to the broadcast & subscribe to the multicast stream, the data is mirrored onto the necessary links. But, any link should have a maximum of one instance of the stream.
In theory multicasting sounds great, and there have been some very interesting implementations, particularly on Internet2. But, it never seems to hit critical mass.
I used this program many months ago to broadcast live concerts. It works pretty good, and the algorithm it uses to distributed load seems to work out decently most the time, unless its just random, then Im using it to, pick lotto numbers
Aw, man, I already read your blog just to shut you up, now I have to listen to your favorite songs (which are lame, fyi) just to validate your existence? Wouldn't it be easier if you just called yr mom and dad and told them you need more attention?
This brings an interesting question: how to anonymize the stream source, the initial node. How to make impractically difficult to trace down the originator of the stream. Once this is solved, no more paperwork for hobbyists.
Bureaucracy is a form of terrorism.
back in my younger, wilder days, I used to run a few porn sites. Made enough money to go to Europe once, and was doing OK until the usenet police got all my acocunts canceled for spamming. I always wanted to do video. However, there was no way on my budget I could have afforded the bandwidth or the licenses, etc. for streaming media. If this really works, it changes everything. I've moved onto things were if they found I was doing porn I'd be fired, but for folks wanting to get into it, this is great stuff.
On their download page, PeerCast claims that their program has "No adware/spyware". How can I verify this without complete source code to the program? If I learn that the claim is a lie, how can I change the program to do what I want without source code under a license that lets me modify it? If I want to distribute my improved version to help others, how can I do this without source code under a license that lets me distribute my derivative?
This is one way people acquire backdoors, spyware, adware, and all the other software people don't want.
Digital Citizen
For example, I can imagine that this will be the answer to national broadcasters who don't rely on advertising (BBC is the only one I can think of) who will jump on this as a way to transmit for next to nothing on the internet.
Now if they could only restrict it to people who pay the license fee it'd be a perfect solution...
Peercast only allows you to watch what is being shown on any given channel as it is broadcast, much like regular broadcast TV.
The content shown is dictated by the operator of that channel.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Have a look! We're announcing the opening at VloggerCon in NYC.
Read my blog: HansMast.com
Perhaps there's something in here that can help.
http://www.peercast.org/code/
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
This is good to hear and is truly revolotionary for the home broadcaster. In comparison, Podcasting is not "realtime" broadcasting, I imagine peercasting will have a more "live" feel.
Heh I guess this would be a good test to see how well my peercast station can stand up. the link to my station is on my homepage @ http://lightfoots.org I currently Broadcast content that is under a Creative Commons Share or simular license. You can also Leave me a comment in the peercast Yellow pages by clicking on the message bubble you can so a search for my station Just type Lightfoot That should bring up my station :) lets see if I can get over a Hundred listners using just a standard Cable internet connection
Bandwidth costs money to providers. NxMulticasts=Red Ink. Geesh... End users only think about themselves...
do you agree that there is a large segment of the population who think that what passes for politics in America is complete bullshit? I would say about 50% or so.
Don't you think there is a niche available for some sort of politics-oriented show that looks at all that from a different perspective?
I myself am working on a public-domain (copylefted) political documentary which I hope to distribute via p2p.
Once I get a peercasting station to distribute my documentary, I hope that it will be passed on via other p2p networks.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
http://www.freecast.org/ - another GPL peercasting project, FreeCast
Who cares about a channel dedicated for perverts watching 24/7 urinating sessions? These losers should get some afterlives.
...free time costs money, if you rent your house, pay taxes, eat occasionally etc.
There are people with talent, but in order to fulfil their dreams they need money to live.
The trouble is, a lot of production companies share your point of view and expect talent (I'm speaking from an animation/scriptwriting perspective here) to work for virtually nothing.
(Of course there are broadcasters and production companies who pay a very good wage for your talent. The downside of this financial security is that often you'll have to wait six months for them to cough up, and smile through gritted teeth when you hear of their plans to turn your idea into the latest celebrity reality crossover.)
It's easy to underestimate the value of a regular paycheque. I know it sounds mercenary but I speak as one who's had to scrimp and starve in order to finally be making a living in animation eight years down the road.
And I'd love to know the names and addresses of these media companies with "spare cash" you speak of. Fact is, the cash is never spare and there are ALWAYS conditions involved.
That said, I'm currently developing a sketch show which looks like it will have to be produced largely in spare time otherwise it runs the risk of being gutted and ruined. But at least some of the funding is coming from a production company.
I've had the theme tune to Quantum Leap going through my head all day... Now you have, too!
Check it out. http://www.mythtv.org/ http://torrentocracy.com/
I imagine that the bottleneck for peercast and similar technologies isn't the lack of bandwidth, but lack of original content. I'm sure if this takes off there will be plenty of people who will be willing to broadcast their Star Trek collection or whatever TV / Movie series/show/music CD they like, but I think there will be very little content created by the broadcasters. I for one don't need someone else to decide in what order I watch episodes of my favorite TV shows, so I'd be more inclined to just download and save them to disk to watch at my leisure. Additionally, although the argument can be made that, like 'blogging', this technology will allow anyone with an opinion some airtime, I make the arguement that of all the bloggers I know, only one of them has the technical aptitude to operate, edit, and upload a video or audio stream. And he doesn't own a video cam, so it doesn't even matter. My prediction: No new content due to lack of availability of technology (camcorders) and knowledge of how to manipulate them (video editing).
The homepage of the project stands than peercast is open source, but I dont see any source available, neither licence type.... huh?
But it gave me the willies because they want you to "just disable your firewall" to make it work. I don't see it becoming adopted in a widespread manner unless they changed that since a few months ago the last time I tried it out. there's also Streamer peer to peer, but last I looked it was windows only (the linux version is way outdated and zero maintainers) and it was hard to setup and use.
.10 yet, waiting for smart guys to release a decent rpm version pre compiled) and all sorts of googled "fixes" and just cannot get burning to work anymore. Probably spent 15 hours on it just looking and trying different remedies so far, worst stumped I have ever gotten in linux so far. K3B, xcdroast and command line, all b0rken for me. :(
But..it's a worthwhile interesting concept, certainly worthy of more developer interest when you see it's practical aspects as opposed to some of the projects out there that are popular and have a lot of interest. Personally, I'd trade the next ten video games or next 1,000 app "skins" or the next 100 "me too" linux distros for one decent example of this peer to peer streaming tech that actually worked and had some features such as "security" and "better anonymity".
Not a developer so can't help much or I would. Given the interest in music, talk, news, blogging, now video blogging, you would think this would garner some more interest.
Totally on the side, has anyone come up with a decent fix for burning cd isos under the 2.6x kernel yet? I'm stumped, tried different kernels going way back to 2.67 up to all the latest 2.6.9s (no, don't have a
BitTorrent isn't illegal at all. It's just a means of doing a download. Just as http or ftp can be used to share copyrighted content, so can BitTorrent. But like http or ftp, BitTorrent can be used to download legitimate content too. Even the MPAA admitted that Bittorrent has significant non-piracy uses, so BitTorrent is not illegal in any sense of the word.
Also, if you know anything about the history of BitTorrent and its creator, you would know that BitTorrent wasn't created in order to share copyrighted content. At the time BitTorrent was created, there were plenty of functioning piracy networks. What did not exist, however, was a means for normal internet users to share big files efficiently. So Bram made BitTorrent in order that people could share big files. That this would be used for piracy was inevitable, but that was not the point of creating it. If it had been meant specifically for piracy, there would be a search function built into it.
Peercast is similar except that it's about allowing normal internet users to share audio and video streams. Will it be used for piracy as well? Almost certainly, but again: that's not its point.
Keith
This whole idea seems to violate a number of exclusive rights set forth in the Copyright Act, most notable:
17 USC 106(3) - to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public....
17 USC 106(4) - in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly,
17 USC 106(6) - in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
stream tv groups like #streamtv on efnet, i forsee a major increase in streams around the corner
Verizon is doing a huge rollout of its fiber network, generally at least a few test towns in each state, which once the initial infrastructure is laid will grow extremely quickly I would think. I believe it had something like 15m down and 3m up, I'm currently on 1.5 down so I don't think this is going to be a problem soon, just wait until they starting doing their "5x faster than cable!!!" advertisments and watch the competition rush to respond.
Wait until PeerCast takes off: providers might realize that those peercast programs make up a significant portion of their overall bandwith. Here's where greed kicks in: If peercast is popular enough (like "50% of all internet traffic"), the providers will implement IP multicasting to lower their bills.
:-)
PeerCast might be a means to an end!
This brings an interesting question: how to anonymize the stream source, the initial node. How to make impractically difficult to trace down the originator of the stream. Once this is solved, no more paperwork for hobbyists.
If you do that, they can still go after the listeners.
Peercast software clones and retransmits the stream - so every listener is also making unlicensed copies in the process of forwarding. All they have to do is subscribe themselves, see where the packets are coming from, and go after that guy. Rinse and repeat to collect enough listeners to make a big show trial.
People attempting to circumvent this will also have to figure out how to anonymize the forwarding - including the IP address. That's tough.
(Recently a court decided the DMCA doesn't let them get the IP address to subscriber info for peer-to-peer application users. But that is just because the DMCA is worded to let them get such info from ISPs only to identify users who posted unauthorized copies and STORED them on the ISP's servers. Congress can easily "correct this oversight" to allow them to find out who's serving copies stored on their own mahcines or making copies on the fly - and likely will now that a court has spoken and the RIAA is on notice that they need more legislation to continue their attacks.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Thanks, what I saw at the download page was just a binary for my OS and some documentation. I must have missed the link to download source code under a free software license.
Digital Citizen
/usr/bin/w00t
apokalupsis webcomics
Planless in Middleearth
The REAL LUPIN III page
Doctor Who / Star Trek Crossover fanfics
There was another webcomic I wanted to list here, but I lost the URL. It was about two guys who receive a package which contains a sword that allows them to travel to parallel universes, then they meet 2 girls which are alternate versions of themselves, also two bad duplicates of themselves from other realities. It's got lots of twists.
If anyone knows the URL please post it. Most pages were in black and white with some occasionally in colour. I think it was on keenspace but I can't find it.
They don't have to worry too much yet. I think the answer to the question posed in the article title is "No." The one station on peercast.org at this time with more than 20 listeners skips like crazy.
Part of the problem is that both the backbone and the ISPs are only delivering "best effort" Quality of Service (QoS) to their clients. This makes for dropped packets, which means either holes in the stream or retransmissions and stuttering. In a peercast environment such interruptions add up with every hop. (And you have to use retransmission-based protocol, accepting the jitter, to get any significant amount of the stream to the later-generatoin clients.)
Another issue is that they vastly oversubscribe their backhauls. Like 100-to-1 or more. This isn't all that big a deal when you're downloading web pages - things just get slower if everybody hits a button at once. And it's not a killer for VoIP, which is still relatively low-bandwidth. But if a number of customers are all trying to peercast even a low-res video stream simultaneously it totally blows their provisioning model.
They also don't enable multicast for anything but their own "value added" services. (That would enable low-budget broadcast applications without peercasting, which would then explode, chewing up their backhaul bandwidth without giving them any added revenue to pay for it.)
About a year ago I was proposing (to my colleagues at a router company) the idea that deploying a peercast-like application which would use multicast when available and unicast otherwise, would change the incentive structure: ISPs would quickly become flooded - but could drastically cut their traffic by enabling multicasting for ordinary users.
I don't know if this peercast software has opportunistic multicast capability. (I sure hope it does.) Without that the incentive on the ISPs is PURELY to try to eliminate the traffic by blocking the application, rather than achieve a win-win by improving the service.
One of the main checkboxes for the next generation of networking equipment is the ability to identify and deny (or enhance) certain applications' protocols and connections. As thees abilities become more available, watch for ISPs to write terms of service that only allow you do participate in things like peercast if you buy an extra-cost "enhanced" service package.
Of course this will lead to an arms race, as new applications attempt to disguise themselves from the filtering. But even if successful, cloaking approaches lead to reduced functionality and user base. Meanwhile, their explicit violation of terms of service that forbid them lead to legal action, more legislation and penalties, and other nastyness.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Everyone's tearing this thing to shreds based upon this embryonic release. The point is, the vision is absolutely on target.
TiVO is very, very close to being a killer app. So you take TiVO and turn it in to an opensourced downloadable PC based app, and then add P2P streaming and theoretically you've got infinite on-demand programming. Am I the only one that thinks that would rule?
Granted there are some enormous technical problems (not the least of which are upload bandwidth, bitrate issues, and MPAA / ASCAP legal threats) but the basic idea here is not only strong but in my opinion it seems like an obvious winner in terms of answering demand.
It should also be said that this release is stable and has a seamless UI / Install experience. That's also pretty huge. After all the thing that makes TiVO so great is that my mom can use it. I give these guys an A+ for vision and preliminary execution. Do I think the technology has a long way to go? Yes. Do I think they have a chance of doing it? Yes.
My three cents.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Is there a (-1 Ignorant) mod?
Check out patent #6633570
I invented that collaborative networking for Roger Wilco, the gamers voice radio applet of 6 years ago or so. It had dynamically optimizing broadcast trees amongst the nodes... helped us do the impossible while keeping 90% of your modem free for the game. The tech worked well in a fairly interactive environment and should work BETTER in a broadcaster/audience model as these guys are doing it.
I'd also explore the patents we cited in background.
I'd wanted to bend the old RW tech to the same purpose, but I'm not coder enough to have done it right. Pity I did not know of this work -- good luck!
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Seems that many people don't know about this, but the latest versions of Winamp include something called the "media library", including a list of live television like streams. Nullsoft has pitched the NSV format, which works awfully well -- it is really mp3 audio plus VP3 for video. If this was improved to use ogg vorbis for audio and say ogg theora for video (theora is based on VP3), it would use even less bandwidth. My point is, if you browse through the media library you will quickly see that TV is gonna die soon. Streaming video works very well, there are already lots of streams available and by utilizing peer to peer to overcome bandwidth constraints we're going to see a heluvalot more public streams out there, with lots of interesting content.
Regular television offers us next to nothing, and everyone knows it.
I really hate that. Multicast and, later, IPv6 would bring so many new capabilities...
Bittorrent takes >30% of the bandwith in the Internet. And Bittorrent is just a small kludge compared to multicast. If a Bittorrent has 10 receivers, multicast would save 90% of the bandwidth. That's a lot of bandwidth saved.
A multicast P2P would alleviate my bandwith woes. Specially with DSL; DSL gives people more download than upload speed, and without multicast, every kb of download needs someone doing a kb upload. Multicast duplicates packets inside the network so a kb uploaded of a popular file could mean many kb downladed... Goodbye to queues!
Coupled with some credit system so good uploaders get first choice in next multicasted download.
With IPv6 P2P gets more goodies. Quality of service, so I can set my mulita to a lower priority so it does not slow my slashdot surfing to jellyfish speed
Why do not open-source P2P embrace the new technologies? As soon as programs start giving some advantages to multicast/IPv6 sharers, users will start asking for it. And then ISPs will start providing it. It makes sense for them, it makes sense for the backbone, it makes sense for the users.
Ehhh, no! With p2pcast/peercast/whatever, the data travels many redundant pathes in the providers network, thus clogging up much more bandwidth than a multicast stream.
With multicast, you'd have (*) a single stream entering the provider. Only the very last router which connects to the dial-in/DSL pool would multply the packets and send them to all clients.
A MUCH better solution.
But inertia keeps IPv4 (instead of IPv6) and missing 'business opportunities' (they are there, but those who decide seem to be often stupid and short sighted...) prevents widespread multicast networking.
(*) - With today's internet topologies the consumers ends look like the leaf of a tree - Even ISPs often only are a subtree and 'peer' to only one super ISP, a "carrier".
BTW: Sadly this is not fault tolerant, not a good way to lay out a network, but it is cheap...
Actually I'm not sure about that. Keep in mind that we're talking about a broadcast, and I'm fairly certain part of the DMCA clarified what was established as a broadcast on-line. If it's a broadcast, then the notion of suing the listener is equivalent to suing the citizens of a city because the local FM station didn't pay their license. That doesn't make sense.
Hmmm...
Perhaps the user can get off on the ISP's exemption on the claim that, like an ISP, they're only forwarding, not controlling what is in the packets that they forward.
They'd still have to stop participating in a stream if they were notified that the stream is systematically infringing. (But wouldn't THAT be a game of whack-a-mole: Trying to identify, and give legal notice to, everybody listening to a stream.)
The tricky part is, if you listen, and you're part of the P2P network, then I suppose you are also a broadcaster technically.
I think they'd have to show you knew the stream was infringing to actually hang you. Might be a difficult thing to prove - especially if there are legitimate streams on the net using the same mechanism.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ultimately anonymizing does little more than making your activity appear more illegitimate than before. You might get away with it for a while or at even forever, but it's no way to operate in a democratic society. If you want laws to change there are ways to do that, however difficult.
This new goal of resource sharing and decentralization sounds like post-neo-communism. Not that I'm complaining or anything, but as everyone knows, communism only works if everyone works, as does P2P, and this is why its destined to fail, as did communism. There are more and more people getting on the internet now, most of whom don't understand the concept of "sharing", only "taking". The individualist movement, the me-generation did this to us. So while P2P looks good now, so did communism. And eventually it will fail, just like Yugoslavia. So enjoy it while it lasts folks, because the McDonalds kids are pouring in at record rates (either that or get to know the right people so you can get on the best trackers!)
There is another company with fully functional P2P broadcasting that's on the web. You heard it here first: NFT (Network Foundation Technologies) - http://www.nft-tv.com/ The web page has a Windows client for download. (No Unix or Mac clients) Three channels: Nasa TV, A science fiction fan channel, and a rap music channel. It's somewhat lower bandwidth than the examples on the peercast yellow pages, but the video is still pretty smooth. The company has had an open internet test involving over 100 nodes... Definitely argues that p2p broadcasting is already here.
One of the best ways to invalidate a law is to ignore it on a wide scale. If no one pays attention to it, and furthermore, no one manages to enforce it, it becomes just another anti-sodomy law that no one takes seriously.
We have many of these on the books already.
This argument presumes that we live in a democratic society. Which, according to some indices, is not necessarily true.
If you want laws to change there are ways to do that, however difficult.
WAY too difficult, time consuming, and costly. Sure, it is the systemic solution, but I personally am in favor of an evolutionary approach: throw a range of different solutions on a problem, and watch what's the best. Besides, technological solutions to legislative problems take less time; while They need several sessions and tons of paperwork to do even a little change (and the result is uncertain), code can be written by a single person overnight. With finite lifetimes, this is an important factor; a change in the law is worthless for you when you don't live anymore to enjoy it, or are so Alzheimered you don't even remember there are laws at all.
your a hobbyist
"you're".