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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)."
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.
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
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!
...when they have compelling content. Its all about the content, nothing about technology.
There is nothing inherently illegal about this. And it is not illegal in the US. In fact, I can imagine some radio stations and companies using this. In the case of companies, the otherday I listened (with slides) to a scheduled live webcast that was probably viewed by a couple thousand other people. If the company could set up a client that would let the viewers watch the webcast and help upload at the same time it would significantly reduce their bandwidth expenses. There are some companies that are going to love this technology if they can implement it and have it work.
Nasa streams NASA TV over the internet too. They could use this to reduce their costs as well.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Maybe they should p2p their web site. It's already down.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
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.
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
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
This is legal in the US, but you have to pay license fees per song and per listener, unless you play stuff that's not covered by ASCAP or BMI or SoundExchange. There are also restrictions on what songs you can play, and when you can announce them. This goes for mirrors of on-the-ar broadcasts as well.
-mkb
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
If they can pull this off, I expect a *lot* of illegal stuff going on. Namely, say, the online broadcasting of complete cable/dish/local station lineups.
.zip, .tgz, iso, .avi, etc files of greater than N bytes), and run the script; torrents are automatically created and served. As a client, should your browser be smart enough to list .torrent files in the ACCEPT header as desired more than the types of content being torrented, MultiView enabling will make the server pass back the torrent file instead of the actual file; if a browser is asking for a torrent, it undoubtedly has an application set up for mime type application/x-bittorrent (my default install of firefox already does, at the very least). As a consequence, if your browser is "torrent aware", you automatically get a torrent when available, and if it's not, the web server hands you the normal file instead.
I currently would like to see a lot more torrenting of regular web content. I've been working a bit on scripts to try and make it easier to incorporate torrent-serving into web serving. As a server (I've just been using Apache), you turn on MultiViews and define inclusion criteria (say, you want users to be able to get torrents of
An even better route (but more complex, and not something I'm willing to spend the time on currently) would be to set up (for both browsers and servers) an encoding type 'torrent' (i.e., just like you can have pages encoded with gzip and whatnot). This would allow you at the very least to serve individual files used for immediate display (like large pictures, flash, etc), and at best (but more complicated) serve entire an entire web page, as a single torrent. Naturally, dynamic content cannot be included in this, but the static parts of a dynamic page can.
Hey, guys, I'm just pleased as punch to report that it's a fleet of a hundred Vogon Battle Destroyers!