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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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
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.
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.
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.