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Peercasting Ready for Primetime?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bit-torrent-for-the-rest-of-the-world dept.

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)."

2 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Quick guess.. by SirFozzie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
  2. Media BLOGs? by TheLoneCabbage · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!