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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)."
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.
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.
``"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.
However, I do have to commend the peercast.org folks for an exceptionally nice user experience for their software. It installs in a snap and works immediately with zero configuration, using my default media players even. That's a big step toward wide adoption. Now if only the the ISPs would stop being so stingy with upload bandwidth, so the concept actually had a chance of working...
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
I can't imagine anybody using this for long.
This is different from bittorrent for several reasons.
Streaming media requires data to arrive from the start to the end. bittorrent doesn't guarantee that the start arrives before the rest of the data. Actually bittorrent acts like it buffers for the duration of the stream - then the stream can play. This system sends the data in order so you only have to buffer for a short time - like any normal streaming protocol.
The second difference (as it appears from the documentation) is that this is just an icecast client and an icecast server rolled up together; basically a normal icecast relay but with a local display. Add in to that the ability to find relays using some sort of tracker and the clients can switch away from bad relays.
This is problematic if you end up having to keep hopping. What is needed is multiresolution codecs with low resolution data being sent by many peers (mirrored), and higher resolution data being interlaced among them (striped). That way you would be connected to several peers and a failure in any of them leaves the stream working at a slightly reduced quality until another peer can be connected. This doesn't necessarily mean using a multiresolution transform for audio and video, because the data is often separable into broad data and fine data anyway.