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Video Distribution Platform Aiming to Kill TV
skaterperson writes "I just read about Downhill Battle's new open source video platform - a publishing tool based off of BattleTorrent and a video player written in Python. They've started a whole new organization to sponsor the project. They say "TV channels" will be made out of RSS feeds and anybody can subscribe to another user's content channel. The system is being designed for the express purpose of putting broadcasting in the hands of individuals. I like this idea of using recent advances in filesharing and syndication to allow aggregated content to be delivered to your desktop. There is a radio show on the project available at echoradio." The project is just getting underway, with a (hopeful) launch date sometime in June of this year.
Screw that...in the future, everyone will have their own public-access TV show.
Seriously though, where is this going? It sounds like for every person who decides to actually publish something with thought and content, about 100 people will just be publishing their webcam of them going about their day. This impending explosion of mind-numbing neo-reality TV is going to make Survivor look like Shakespeare.
Here's a tip: folks, if you're wondering if your day-to-day existence is interesting enough to make into a reality TVshow, odd are you're WRONG. Keep it to yourself.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Do we really need more public access television?
Granted, there is talent out there, but is the way to find them to give everyone a tv show and then filter out the bad ones?
Derive Politics
I think sometimes hi-tech people forget about Cleetus and Maude sitting in their trailer park in Alabama. Cleetus and Maude are consumers, just like us, but like their new 27 inch TV. Advertisers will continue to see these people as valid demographics for quite some time.
My point is that you can have all sorts of fancy delivery systems and video on demand stuff. Most real people will continue to turn on the TV and flip channels looking for "Reba" reuns for a long, long time. Don't throw out those rabbit earrs quite yet.
One reason that today;s model, flawed though it may be, is successful is that it provides entertainment that people want to see. If people like the content then they are going to make a free and voluntary choice to not give it up.
One such example is sports. I'm not interested in a low quality broadcast of the SuperBowl. I'll take the commercial production of the SuperBowl any time.
It's good to have goals that aim a bit high but realistically nothing like this is going to kill TV. There's just too much money in it for it to go away anytime soon.
This does sound like a really cool thing though. One thing I'm wondering about is whether this will actually work or not. I'm sure they must have done a fair bit of testing to have gotten this far with it but I have to wonder if something like BitTorrent would actually work for streaming video at consistently acceptable speeds. Don't get me wrong, BitTorrent is awesome and very often gives me great speeds but it just as often goes incredibly slow. As in 1-2KB/s slow.
So now when I flick onto a wildlife documentary, or cookery show, I'll get hard core porn.
Putting publishing/broadcasting in the hands of The People has shown us one thing: The People are perverts.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
At best this will create a lot of 640x320 webcam videos being viewed by noone, and a couple semi-pro's showing their content before going "big time."
Free MacMini
The server is based on BlogTorrent not BattleTorrent.
Good god man you left out the most obvious thing, porn. Porn drove ecommerce into the mainstream, streaming media, the lust for more bandwidth at home, why on earth don't you see it coming (no pun intended) here??
So, who will be spending the millions of dollars a year to produce the content that everyone will happily share this way?
TV is good because it assumes that I watch the commercials and endure some content I'd rather not. That's the current model that pays for things.
In a choose your own feed senario advertising becomes pruned. So, who makes new content and who pays for it?
Much of business strategy, especially the vernacular, is based on warfare. Chief executive officers. War rooms. Strategy itself. And so on.
You know I started reading this interesting book called Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant which talks about this a little bit. The book basically makes a metaphor between Red Ocean which is traditional competitive markets aggressively competing against each other that turns the ocean into a pool of red. Then you have blue ocean markets which is about finding a new market space and making the competition back in the red ocean irrelevant. Really interesting stuff. Check out the amazon reviews sometime.
Most people are content to passively recieve information via their tv, GENERATION of content is another matter entirely. It's really, really hard to make a good show, even if you have a great idea and a crew to help you realize it. However, I'd rather watch video of someone's uncle's birthday party than sit through the shampoo commercials and vehicular porn that saturate current television programming. Maybe there'll be another http://15.bloop.org/video.shtml/ 15 Minute Show.
No more control of the air-waves by special interest groups.
No more religious-right influence on content.
No more psy-ops programs at weekday prime-time.
Girlfriend, you've got your own TV show...
I for one welcome our self-producing-TV-show overlord masters. The previous ones were crap!!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Someone noted: "One reason that today's model, flawed though it may be, is successful is that it provides entertainment that people want to see..."
Meaning the networks are better at deciding what content the masses want rather then the masses is rediculous! It may be true in the sense that the networks are the only ones who can control the distribution of said content, good or otherwise.
What is happening now is more and more passive viewers are not plopping their arses down for several hours a night to watch advertising saturated "primetime" content. More and more are using technology to record and view what the want when they want.
Primetime and the telelvision advertising model is rapidly disappearing. That is the PRIMARY reason the industry is fighting so hard for the broadcast flag. They must control the hardware or the user will decide when and where the content is consumered not the network and their advertising model goes out the window.
What the Broadcast Flag is really protecting is the networks advertising model not content. Once users can no longer freely record and watch content the way they want, they will simply find alternatives or find another source of entertainment.
Don't laugh. This GARBAGE the networks call content is also drastically shrinking the "masses" that tune in at primetime. There is an ever growing list of more stimulating alternatives that do not require the user to sit through hours and hours of advertising. And that is what everyone is trying to protect... the MONEY!
Locking down shitty content will only cause viewers to find alternative content. Locking down good or better content will only PISS OFF and alienate an ever-shrinking audience!
Podcasting is beginning to creep into this, but there aren't more than about a dozen "real" (i.e. not produced originally as a podcast) programs being podcast (e.g. BBC 'In Our Time', Virgin Radio 'Pete and Geoff Show', WGBH Morning Stories), and these aren't otherwise commercially available.
The chances of '24' being made available on the web by the producers when they'd rather sell DVDs is unlikely, unless there's some damned efficient DRM going on. (Yes, I am ignoring the possibility of RSS feeds for non-official copies these shows being made available by third parties).
Without that sort of 'pro' content available to its competition, TV won't be going anywhere soon.
Phil
Maybe this is a bit off topic, but it has to be said.. Why is every other new tech story on slashdot about one technology/software/whatever trying to KILL another one? I think the appropriate word is "competition". Headlines like the above have lost their sensationalism through over use. Everyone take one step backwards towards reality.
That said.. unless your average 'other user' can spend millions to put together quality and/or entertaining programming, I don't see television leaving the picture anytime soon. (pun intended)
This all existed once. It was called the MBONE, a consortium of Tier 1 providers who agreed to handle each other's multicast routing protocol requests. You could tune to 224.4.4.2 that day for a MIT lecture on particle physics from your home. You could attend tech conference proceedings.
But the MBONE broke down. Because there weren't enough multicast addresses to go around. Because multicast had scaling issues with the way feeds got pruned when the # and size of data sources grew large.
Now, even today, multicast is the forgotten cousin who sits alone under the tree. Corporate networks rarely run PIM or enable multicast. It doesn't even get enabled in small ponds, despite lots of books from guys like Beau Williamson on how to configure it. It gets ignored in the face of a plethora of multicast client and multicast capable encoders.
Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, got rich selling broadcast.com. The idea was something akin to Rob Glaser and Real, bring streaming video to the masses. Except we have to use unicast and spend our time making tweaks to UDP at the application layer, because that's the only way it will work. Because we can't even create a central organization to manage DNS correctly, much less be issuing and retrieving a scare commodity of multicast IP addresses. People will hog them! The television networks will get the FCC! Boo hoo!
Shame really. The promise of watching community produced tv from any garage in the world now falls to projects like these, which fall back on bitTorrent to recreate the essential function of a multicast routing protocol: to overlap a node tree map on the internet.
Perhaps this reinvention of the wheel one more time will get it working. But this problem comes up every so often, and I think it will take Internet 2 and IPv6 to solve it correctly. Until then, it's just sharing rips of tv shows off cable and sat, and not the net population ignoring the traditional mediums and making their own shows. It'll be another decade before that shift happens.
On the plus side, I find this very fascinating. It's an interesting idea and I'm bang alongside any attempt to increase people's ability to communicate.
And where is it going? I haven't a clue - and frankly analyzing the impact of this requires a proper timeframe.
How long will it take to get off the ground? What kind of content will be produced and what kind of content production tolls will evolve in the next few years? Will there be an overwhelming amount of crap - and if so, will there then be a die-off-pull-back effect that leaves better content, or what?
My wife is a ad designer who does video editing as a hobby and as a professional. She's watched the tools for broadcast and video editing change radically in the seven years she's done it, watched companies rise and fall. Communication is an odd, tricky, unpredictable business, and this initaitive will be just as hard to assess.
But it also SOUNDS damn cool.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
But with this tech, and a comm-link of some sort, existing development teams could broadcast their own shows. Might help out with recruitment and donations.
--jrd
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Standardize the protocols and integrate it in a set-top box. Sell the box at Wal-Mart. Problem solved.
You could just have your own REAL tv show on public broadcasting: If you're in NYC, manhattan has 4 channels:
"Anybody can submit a show to MNN for air as a series or special. It should be 28 or 58 minutes long. Manhattan residents and non profits get priority. Find out more at questions. "
If Manhattan of NYC is this easy, image how easy it is in any other town...
People have been predicting things like this for years. Anyone who deals with P2P traffic in ISP work knows that this isn't going to fly. For crying out loud, Video over DSL hasn't gone anyplace and DBS is still running in circles chasing its tail. Why? Ease of distribution and bandwidth.
Sure, there's something to be said about content but not nearly as much as all this. And when it comes to content, people don't want ten million Internet broadcasters clogging up the Internet with pointless vanity crap they won't want nearly as much as a high cost well polished production like CSI or Queer as Folk or whatever.
Cable provides the best bandwidth out there as of right now and even that tops out at a couple hundred high definition channels. To broadcast over the net introduces new TCP/IP overhead robbing you of bandwidth further. Imagine if ten thousand people all choose one of a thousand broadcasts to watch simultaneously in one city alone. Imagine repeating this every night across every city and town. We'd need to start building fiber pipes measured like sewer pipes as in feet in diameter.
Okay, so we use a lower resolution and we settle for lag and breakup? No, I don't think so. Who would be willing to watch Battlestar Galactica if it were webcast at 320x240 when you could watch it on cable or satellite as it was shot? Doesn't that defeat the whole movement towards richly detailed hi-def content?
I don't see it happening for these interrelated reasons: bandwidth, resolution, content, viewing experience, etc. As much fun as some webcams can be, I can't see a future of all sorts of amature broadcasters ever going anywhere.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
You know, everyone is complaining about how if you put television in the hands of the average person, they will make a lot of crappy television.
:)
While this is true, for the most part, there WILL be lots of good stuff coming out of this too, and you can't disregard it.
Look, if this catches on, it will be exactly what happened to music with the advent of home computers... suddenly, everyone and their mother could write tracks. People started publishing them. Yes, there was a LOT of crap. BUT -- there was still a good proportion of awesome music being made by people who otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity. You had to look for it.. but then along came netlabels, who filtered it all for you... then you just have to find the good netlabels... but my point is that the MORE, the BETTER. the more opportunity for crap, means more opportunity for GOLD, too.
there might be some really good stuff coming out of this, and I'm sure you'll all be subscribing to the best "channels" of it.
For any decent piece of content produced somebody is going to have to dedicate some time and resources to it. To do this in a steady stream it will require a near full time effort. Since the basis of P2P is going to be to distribute it free it will be very hard to get a DRM model to work. They could however come up with an ad supported system to make it equitable. I guess my only question is, would the community using this type of software be willing to accept that? Time will tell I guess. I do see this as a trend of companies like Brightcove, Prodigem and Akimbo emerging to fill this new demand. It will be interesting to see what business models play out.
Thankfully, as you alluded, mutlicast capability lives on in Internet2:
http://multicast.internet2.edu/
At the University of Wisconsin, our new 10Gbps ethernet backbone and all associated equipment in a major network upgrade initiative supports multicast to the desktop. We're operating an IP-based television distribution system exclusively via multicast distribution (using locally scoped addresses, so it's only available internally).
So we can still go to 224.2.231.45, and get a live stream of NASA TV from the University of Oregon.
For the uninitiated, multicast essentially allows any number of clients to "listen" to the same stream: multicast-aware network equipment just handles when a network gets traffic. If a user on the University of Wisconsin campus decides to watch the broadcast from the University of Oregon, one stream's worth of bandwidth will enter our network. If a hundred - or a thousand - people decide to watch it, it's still that same one stream's worth of bandwidth coming in, that everyone else is simply "listening" to. So for each network segment, whether you're looking at an individual subnet or in a whole-internet sense, there is either:
- 0 streams
- 1 or more streams, but all with the equivalent network usage of 1 stream
It's really a fantastic way of distributing video. Not only is there no additional load beyond the one stream on the network, but there is also *only the load of one stream* on the server.
If multicast were enabled on the internet-at-large, individual people really could distribute video to the world: all they'd need is essentially enough bandwidth to distribute one stream, and one, or one million, could listen in.
(And yes, there are ways this can break down, but I'm just trying to give a simplified explanation here.)
Umm...no.
If you had some kind of measurable brain function, I was not speaking elitist. My point was that people are wrong to declare an embedded technology like TV dead. People in our business (tech) tend to forget the vast majority of people still like the simplicity of free TV and it's nice little remote control.
Feel free to shift that chip over to the other shoulder....it must be getting heavy.
So many of you here are saying it will be just 1000s of public access TV low-quality shows. But the fact is that the people who are interested in making this sort of content for public access and for videoblogs and such, have all been DOING IT BY THEMSELVES (or with a couple of friends). But the real potential disruptive force in all this is the POWER OF WIDESPREAD COLLABORATION using them there "Internets".
The real problem is the scripts for these public access failures. But when amateur content creators really start adopting the open source software creation model, where hundreds of content creators start using internet software to collaborate and create scripts, find public domain and creative commons video footage, and using cheap digital cameras to film events and interviews from all over world, and then divide up the work a la open source software, edit the video using hundreds of different computers using cheap or even free editing software, then, THEN it blow even Hollwood out of the water.
And the main thing that this copylefted content will offer is something that the TV industry is in REALLY short supply of--a more real worldview and a wider range of philosophical and sociopolitical viewpoints. For example, every friggin day on TV you see celebrities, politicians and other famous people being treated with kid gloves, like the alpha animals they are. But on internet tv, they are gonna get trashed. And people are gonna like that.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Huh. Yet another reason for ISP's not to give in to RIAA pressure and adopt a code of conduct agreement. If broadcasting is put into the hands of individuals, then bandwidth usage is going to go through the roof. The ISP's will like this since it will generate more business for them and potentially force people to sign up for more expensive "business" as opposed to "personal" accounts. But how in the world will they be able to tell, based on bandwidth alone, whether someone is pirating music/video/software, or whether they're running their own virtual TV station? Hmmm, methinks that the ISP's have yet another reason to tell the RIAA to go f**k themselves.
Networks should allow internet rebroadcast...as long as
1) The program is provided in original format WITH Commercials and credits as originally broadcast. If someone paid money to make something you either pay for it or respect the way they earn their money(ie commercials). You can always fast forward.
2) No wildfeeds...no broadcasting programs here before they are broadcast by the original distributor unless the original distributor is defunct or does not intend to air the program in that area.
The right of first broadcast ought to mean something. The people who made the program ought to have the right to broadcast it first.
Add this feature to Tivos and other DVRs that are connected to the web, and you will revolutionize TV networks, DVRs, and how we all deal with TV.
Its been hinting at this for awhile with service providers moving from one delevery type to a information delevery type. For example phone companies are changing from specifically phone use, to high speed providers that can do phone among other things.
Just think that at some point in the future, TV companies will not be associated with a channel, but more related to a website. For example, instead of going to channel 23 for Cartoon Network to watch Anime, you may go to their website and get a feed to watch the shows you like. No "TV" channels will even exist. That downloadable chunck will have a small set of ads with it so they can get their revenue. Ads targeted a bit more directly at their consumer as well.
Its like a SUPER Season Pass for the Tivo crowds. If Tivo is smart they will jump at this immediately. Even extend this to SUPER Season Pass podcast radio shows. Wicked cool.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
Sure the image quality of rendered content right now is such that no one is going to mistake it for live action. BUT, when you take a look at what engines like Unreal Engine 3 are capable of and you extrapolate out a few more years then you can see where this is headed.
I believe that TV of the future will include much rendered content being produced by small independent teams or individuals using the machinima approach.
Ok, so it might not kill TV. but the main problem with everyone's argument that it will or will not work is they are looking at this with the view that it will be for the most part leagal, 17 year old girls being excluded.
/me takes a deep breath
But thats not what its going to be. Sure Napster gave everyone in the world the ability to distribute their own Music over p2p. Sure Shoutcast gave everyone a change to run a radio station playing legal unprotected music. Sure, Bittorent gives everyone the ability to easally share large legal files, such as home videos or GNU software. Sure, Winamp's Shoutcast TV gives people the ability to stream there own telivision shows Right Now (yes there are technical diferences bear with me).
But did they?
No. Napster was at the top of its game because people shared copywritten mp3s. Shoutcast worked because everyone could take the mp3 collections they got from Napster, build up there own playlist, and stream music for their friends. BitTorrent make it easy to get Everything people wanted, epecially Movies and TV Shows. Winamp's TV has well Porn, Crap, and People breaking the law. Just open it up, look at the streams. The streams running say 24/7 South Park or 24/7 Scrubs, are they legal? Do you really think any money is going to the copywrite holders?
This will work because it will make it so ANYONE with a halfway decent connection will be able to seed what ever they want, their personal selection of digital media constantly. Say Joe Kid with his 7mbit/1mbit dsl starts a Sapranoes all day every day. Or Jane Kid starts Her own version of The Movie Channel, using her favorite XVID releases she got from bittorent. Shoutcast didnt get popular because it gave people a place to my thier own music, it got popular because it gave people a place where they could play the DJ. This will get popular because it will give everyone with a halfway decent upload the ablity to play Zero Cool his first "hacking" at the age of 18, Running the tv STATION, not the production.