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.

Comments

"Fifteen minutes of fame"

[TripMaster Monkey]

"In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes."
- Andy Warhol

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.

Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame"

[lemnik]

I agree. On the other hand it opens nice opertunities for communities of artists. I've kinda always liked the idea of Open Source TV.

Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame"

[gameboyhippo]

I'm not sure that anything can kill TV. People are just not technical enough to spend alot of time setting up what TV they want to see through RSS feeds and whatnot. I think we need to remember sometimes that we are pretty elite when it comes to technology and thus we should think of technology in the sense of the average user's point of view.

Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame"

[mi]

This is just a logical development of "blogs". Limited only by the computer power and bandwidth.

First -- textual blogs. Then -- foto blogs (Flikr, FotoLog). Next -- video clips, then continuous video-streaming, and so on with the possible future technologies (3D-video, avatars, etc.)

in the future, everyone will have their own public-access TV show.

Not everyone has a blog today -- most people never will. This hobby (or profession) is not for all. Some prefer hiking, cars, computers...

Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame"

[blowdart]

if you're wondering if your day-to-day existence is interesting enough to make into a reality TVshow

That hasn't stopped pod casting has it?

All of these personal communication technologies, from email, through web sites, the evolution into blogs, podcasting and now this are full of crap. Really. After all, how many web sites of the ones you've surfed have you found interesting enough to check on a regular basis? 10%? And how many of those were personal sites?

Most of the net content is ego based, not quality based, and unless someone is prepared to put quality content on there it will remain as marginalised as the current ego trip hyped as pod casting.

Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame"

[cyber0ne]

I doubt it would have any greater of a noise to signal ratio as any other public medium. Read Slashdot at -1 for an example. Sure, if something is made truly "public" and "free" it will get crowded with egocentric garbage and probably lots of porn. But there will be diamonds in the rough. Those of us who are interested enough will gravitate towards the quality sources and invite our friends. As for the rest of the sheep? Nobody told them they had to watch the images on their magical glowy boxes all day. They're just as free to do what they want as we are. If they are placated by Paris Hilton's latest mind-numbing comment to some idiot with a camera, let them have it.

Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame"

[lcfactor]

This isn't really about homebrew webcams- this is about companies and organizations like the one I run, who have been out there for five years collecting people with Video, audio production and web skills, and developing media on an 'open-platform' basis, experimenting with non television (23min, etc) formats for content and working with streaming video and both traditional and non-traditional mechanisims to distribute.

This is about the lowering of cost on broadcast and near broadcast quality production means, (DV, HDV, Final Cut Pro, Avid Xpress DV) to the level at which you can have a low cost to get these tools into the hands of a whole team, and work out non-traditional workflows to produce and distribute - this is about the future of the change in workflow and now, the change in distrobution. Many people are working on this model, because they know we are out there (many of us) people that specialize in looking at the whole medium, not just it's individual parts and are working to produce creative in these directions. We've been here taking website and new media contracts, as well as working towards new content mechanisims (partiualrly in next gen music production and promotion) because we know that some day, the distro is coming.

Watch out- content needs creative and there are many groups like ours waiting for the opportunity to innovate creative for a new medium, that is not monopoly controlled but still advertiser viable. This one might be the hit, and it might not- but it is coming.

Now if they would only widen the pipes.

Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame"

[ZTiger]

"People are just not technical enough to spend alot of time setting up what TV they want to see through RSS feeds and whatnot. " - gameboyhippo

In those cases you will find people that provide access to RSS selections. Different people will set up a collection of RSS selections and probably sell that selection to the less knowing. We see that today with News Services. How much of the news from CNN or Times come from Reuters or Associated Press, and then some of their own.

Ten Commandments Be Damned

[gowen]

Gosh. Everything's "Kill, Kill, Kill" round here. Can't we have nice, chilled-out, mellow headlines like

Video Distribution Platform Aiming to Peacefully Coexist With TV

or

Linux Can Live Eternally In State Of Perpetual Grooviness With Windows

Or am I just an old hippy.

Kill TV? Not to the trailer dwellers in Alabama.

[ip_freely_2000]

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.

Content is king

[wheelbarrow]

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.

Re:Content is king

[joshmccormack]

Good point. Making a stupid 30 minute TV show once a week requires an army of people to write it, build sets, act, film, edit, etc. And they're all paid. I'm having a hard time picturing people producing content that frequently at any level of quality.

People thought everyone would publish their own magazines when desktop publishing came around, and it would transform the world. Ditto with cheap video cameras, audio recording equipment, etc. The truth is, digestible content is expensive and labor intensive to produce, no matter what the technology involved.

Great...

[CleverNickedName]

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.

TV is harder than you think

[brontus3927]

I know people who run fairly successful internet radio stations (one has ~1500 listeners), my girlfiend works as a production assistant for NJN, and my friends like to try our hand at amatuer movies for our own consumption. TV & movies are a lot more technically difficult than radio. I'm the first to admit that our movies are horrible, mostly because we don't have professional-grade cameras, lighting, and audio equipment.

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."

Re:TV is harder than you think

[Lumpy]

if you think gear will make your movies better then you need to stop right now.

having a million dollars in equipment will not make bad acting, bad writing and bad direction better.

your lighting kit can be built at home depot for less than $100.00. audio equipment can be low end lapel microphones or a cheap shotgun mic ducttaped to a broom handle. and the camera can be any DV camera made.

Examples? Blair witch was made with what I just mentioned to you. And many other indie films that are pretty darn good are also... check out rewindvideo.com for some more.

YOU DO NOT NEED EXPENSIVE GEAR.

Content?

[Baavgai]

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?

Where is it going?

[torpor]

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!!

Re:Where is it going?

[Dun Malg]

I suppose you have no problem with the massive liberal left bias of the media and TV though, do you? Since you obviously missed it, TV content outside of FOX is vastly tilted towards the left.

It doesn't look tilted to the left if you're already on the left. The reason it looks so right-slanted in the first place is that there's nothing much to the left of them except grumpy soviet-era communists, and they often leftists consider themselves "centrists". To me (as a small-L libertarian), the media looks like it's tilted towards Authoritarianism, with a (to me irrelevant) wide array of left-to-right positions on which particular liberties they want curtailed. It's really a pointless argument to pursue, because everyone has a tendency to see themselves as being more "centrist" than they actually are, and from their point of view things will always seem to slant the other direction.

Content - MY WAY!

[webzombie]

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!

Who wants the MBONE, huh? huh?

[GPLDAN]

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.

A reality-TV show that's actually useful?

[taiwanjohn]

I'd like to see a reality-TV show that focuses on something that actually matters -- for example, third-world development. Take a dozen volunteers and run them through a couple months of training with the Peace Corps or some NGO, then ship them off to Africa to build a school or dig a well or whatever. Then follow their progress through the season, etc...

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

Manhattan

[clinko]

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...

diamonds in the rough...

[radarsat1]

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. :)

Re:BlogTorrent, not BattleTorrent

[Z303]

BattleTorrent was the original name for BlogTorrent.

It lives on in Internet2

[daveschroeder]

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.)

You are forgetting the "Power of Collaboration."

[Cryofan]

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.

Wow, the RIAA's gonna like this... Not.

[atomic_toaster]

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.

Tivos FUTURE!

[Lotharjade]

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.

How This WILL work

[haagmm]

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.