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)."

Comments

Re:A niche for parasites

[Jeremi]

At the moment these systems rely on the social contract to make sure they aren't abused by people who download without contributing upload bandwidth.

As I understand it, BitTorrent (and by extension, IceCase which is layered on top of BitTorrent) solves this problem at the peer level using a tit-for-tat algorithm: people who aren't uploading packets don't get many download packets either. This seems like a much more robust solution than "blessed binaries" (which will be hacked anyway, and prevent people from developing their own clients)