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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)."
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!!!!
Because this is designed to allow you to listen to the music that someone else is broadcasting and then help them broadcast as well. The idea here is not to simply download copyrighted material. Think of it as Peer to Peer Shoutcasting, I guess. This solution seems to slightly more legal (although it is probably still illegal, at least in the US) than standard bittorrent.
This is something genuinely different. If, and it's a big if, they have actually got it working, it will be for media streaming what bittorrent was for file downloading. You wouldn't call BT "yet another download accelerator", would you?
I am trolling
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!
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.
You're not producing any TV shows with actors, sets, or sufficiently large budgets any time soon, are you?
The popularity of "reality TV" could cross over into peercasting. The major media outlet business model for that genre could be affected.
You're not producing any TV shows with actors, sets, or sufficiently large budgets any time soon, are you?
There's a movie called Tarnation that could win an Oscar this year. It was made for something like $200 on a Mac.
The cost of producing high quality content has dropped to an infinitesimal fraction of what it was only a decade ago.
The cost of disseminating high quality content world-wide, with peer-casting type technology like this, has now taken yet another enormous drop in cost.
Let's say some highly newsworthy event occurs in my backyard. I could hook up a camera to my computer and with my $40/month DSL connection, I could broadcast it live to millions of users.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.