Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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
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?