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Peer-to-Peer Internet Television
Lanaki writes "A non-profit based in Austin, TX is merging the free software and Copyleft communities through a new internet TV station: ACTLab TV. They are streaming Creative Commons, Copyleft, public domain content, and original videos using Alluvium software and their own media player. It's all open source, encouraging others to make their own audio and video streams. Their website was released this week and the player and demo stream will go public next week."
I'd expect to see The Screen Savers switch to this format, instead of a podcast.
sounds like a winner if they don't make it too mushed up.. but how are they going to make money to keep it alive.??
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Note the launch of Vobbo (live video blogs) as an example.
Bandwidth is cheap. Disk space is cheap. Video is going to be very big, very soon.
Video Phone Blogs send video messages straight to the web.
Wow, it's like public-access cable TV, only world-wide. Whoopee.
Have you read my blog lately?
Wayne's World! Party time! Excellent!
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Why do they feel the need to surround their text with agressivly flashing graphics?
I couldn't get past the first paragraph before I'd had enough of this. Call me back when they offer a non-stroboscopic version of their content.
You can't take the sky from me...
I was wondering when someone was going to try and organize Creative Commons stuff into a central TV station that people can go to.
/. announcement. If there is no media or software to download yet they might not be slashdotted.
The name isn't very good. ACTLab doesn't feel like a name for a place to go for media... but that's ok.
Good timing on the
10 out of 10 for good intentions, something significantly lower than that for actual potential :(
Is there really enough *good* public domain/open source video content to keep this going? Open source seems to work for software, not for films and TV shows. I'll be convinced when 'open source' films come out at the cinema, and I don't mean some obscure arts cinema, I mean cinemas where real box office hits get shown.
Once again, great intentions, but not much potential.
This reminds me of the dinky little community station we have around here that use and abuse public domain TV shows as much as they can. Except this one is digital. There is a lot of great content out there, as long as the people who made it don't want much money for it.
The main problem here is the competition. There are a lot of other p2p places that don't charge a cent. They just happen to be illegal though.
Sounds like a great way to broadcast these fellows
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
guys start streaming copyrighted stuff via P2P streams? This technology may be shot down by the *.AAs as evil, because it could be used for piracy.
I really wish you would tell us about these things when there is actually something realeased. I usually forget about it by that time.
I would love to see a player built on a Bit-Torrent type solution, but unfortunatly, Bit Torrnet has some limitations for on-demand streaming.
BT doesn't have a "click/watch" type solution. BT is only good for asynchronous delivery of content due to it's download nature. That said, if a future version of BT provided for buffer-demanded priority queing, this would solve the problem. That is my "player" plugged into BT, would know that the next 30 seconds of content is Very high priority, the following 30 seconds is high priority, the next 30 seconds is low priority and the following 30 seconds is very low priority. This could evolve from an MPLS style label switching paradigm of some sort (in model only, not saying to use actual MPLS, rather some of the MPLS best Practices combined with BT).
Just some thoughts.
-Adam
Some friends of mine had a very long-running and fairly successful cable access show entitled, "Fusion Patrol," in Phoenix, that ran weekly for many seasons, and actually had a fairly decent following. They made fun of science fiction and mainstream TV shows and the personalities behind those shows, with a little of other stuff along with. They got cancelled when they made an episode parodying awards shows with, "The Limp Cable Awards", which got them banned by COX Cable due to the political incorrectness of the skit "Jerry's Kids Can Cook Too"... Ah, good times...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Oh wait.
Broadcast Machine is a similar thing (which I'm sure has been mentioned on Slashdot before), but it's not live. I'm not really sure what the benefit of the live broadcast model is when the Internet can better support a video-on-demand model.
Expect to see a lot of college porn. I can see a new industry, P2P UT Pr0n
Life is not for the lazy.
How long until the rest of you non-austiners get to watch some OBT productions? (Anyone familure with Austin's public access should have atleast seen some of his shows. Ol' Bitty was the most longing ran one that I remember, Currently doing Clown Time.
Of course, the reason his shows are so good is they're uncensored un-prescreened call in with the random locals that are up at 1am. This will kind of take that community feel away.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
I wonder what would happen if they managed to incorporate subscription fees or other pay models into the software?
I'm thinking such a move would generate a humongous business opportunity for all involved.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Snif, I still miss Slashdot Radio. But now, thanks to this technology we can get Slashdot video. We will be able to see Cowboyneal and CmdrTaco getting it on in one great geek lovefest on geek subjects.
But really, Slashdot Radio was one of those "programs" a group of people worldwide listened too, just because it was there and it appealed to them. This kind of technology makes this possible for others as well. Sure you might not be interested in the Dutch Open Student competition rock climbing, but a couple of hundred people might. Peer to peer makes it possible to distribute footage without reducing your upstream to one bit/second/customer.
BTW BBC makes use of Kontiki for their peer to peer distribution of their TV programs and I can see other public TV starting that as well. There is no other way you can easily let 1 million people download the 8 o'clock news beteween 20:10 and 00:10 without jamming your internet connection.
Peer to peer is the holy grail of networking.
Use Adsense for Charity
...if we get to see old episodes of "The Young Ones"
sub 384kbps upstream BW on USA 'broadband' service is blocking a huge opportunity for small scale P2P broadcasting. Heck, BW is so tight that decent quality stereo audio via distributed distribution is impractical nigh impossible...
of course you won't be seeing any upstream broadband, even though it's technically possible and as cheap to add to docsis 2 systems as additional downstream. why? because it foils the 'we are in control of broadcasting' mindset of the providers.
what we need is some rules similar to early telephone de-reg that allow 3rd parties to tilize cable channels just like they use telephone infrastructure.
fat chance.
I read through this a bit and got to think that I was surprised that ABC, CBS, and NBC haven't already tried to do this (since they get their revenue from advertising, this would expand their advertising base)... so I decided to look to see if they had even planned to do it. I didn't find anything on plans for them to offer web broadcasts, however I did find this...
http://mediahopper.com/portal.htm
An information hub for international live and pre-recorded web broadcasts.... apparantely this is not such a new concept (and the few I checked out seemed to only require the Windows Media Player, though I'm sure some use Real Player)
Cheers!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
An actual license text is appreciated.
Anyone has the torrent ?
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Please forgive the poster, he's not in a good mood.
Swarmstreaming, I believe kids are calling it these days..:-P
These guys claim to have such a solution; I was just researching this stuff yesterday out of curiosity. Can't find any reviews or examples of people using it in order to determine if it actually works, though.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
What about new companies like http://www.screamnetworks.com/ who are commercializing this type of idea? I mean, what if the Hollywood studios got behind a company like Scream? They'll never back an open sourced model, but if Scream can do this commercially with extremely high quality the day and age of legimite TV and Movies on the Internet might not be far away.
Winamp already does this with their Media Library. They have near hundreds of streams from people, it definatly worth a look. I mean, how else can you watch simpsons, futurama, and seinfeld while at work?
Q. Who gets to decide what content gets shown?
The members of the ACTLab TV community sort through submissions and organize them into thematically-related programs. While we won't be able to show everything we're given, we will go through it all and serve you the very best. To learn more about the people who run ACTLab TV stop by our PEOPLE page.
Well, we shall see just how far they support the concept of free speech..
I see people go on all the time about it but they only REALLY support free speech that THEY agree with.
When it comes to content they find disagreeable, all of a sudden the censorship nazis appear from the woodwork..
I like that projects like these are under active development and getting a lot of attention.
I have to ask, though, why require the download of yet *another* media application to use it?
Would it be possible to make a plugin of the protocol for gstreamer, WMP, or any of the already established multimedia players?
To really get traction, these people are going to have to get people to encode video for their special system, get people to install their special system and get their friends to do the same.
However, there are pieces already out there for this sort of thing that people are already using. RSS to track a program for new episodes. Bittorrent to distribute. FFMpeg (and others) for codec/format support.
There is no practical reason to reinvent the wheel as far as these basic components. But there is a very practical reason NOT to do so. These video files are going to seep into other networks. People in this system are going to want to watch content they get from other networks. If we're looking to build a real alternative... a competitive alternative to the way TV works now, we can't have the distribution and viewing infrastructure fragmented. We need there to be a level of standardizatoin so content creators can export to a set of formats that everybody can play. We need a distribution channel that everybody can use. There needs to be a critical mass of regularly updated content people can "tune in" to before people will be motivated do so.
Machine/BlogTorrent are great examples. Different projects that both leverage the same technologies and in so doing, are compatible with the same distribution/discovery network. And you'll notice people are already downloading TV shows (albeit illegally) via BT and playing them on their desktops... so people are even willing to do this "manually" without the aid of a fancypants fron end.
This chain of tools is doing the job very well. There is no practical reason to fragment the distribution channel/audience when the infrastructure is already in place for grassroots TV distro to reach critical mass.
In short... Beta is already deployed, why introduce VHS? It's not about which technology is better. It's about stealing viewers from members of the MPAA. And the tech is already there.
I think that the technical bits that are still to be worked on are making the existing channel more user-friendly to install and operate. If you want to scratch the grassroots TV itch, there's plenty of work to do on the client side and the human interface bits. If you're more of a diplomat than a coder, take a stab at getting people to agree on a common file format for the vids.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
http://www.coolstreaming.org/
I'd be interested to see if "video blogs" could take off.
I'll start by admitting that I don't quite get blogs, even just the text ones. The signal to noise ratio is too low to interest me.
That out of the way, I understand why some people like them: it's an alternative entertainment and news source. People read them at their desks, during work or during "surfing time" at home, when they're not watching TV.
Podcast blogs get time you spend away from your computer: exercising, driving, on the bus, etc. Your ears weren't doing anything anyway, and you can multicast.
But will people spend time watching their blogs? A text blog can read at your own pace and skimmed. A video proceeds at its own place and you can't do too much to alter it. The quality of the content is still the same. But it feels more like TV and less like web surfing, and so I wonder if people will find it more entertaining/informative than TV. TV is pretty damn compelling for most people.
Maybe. Video reporting from the middle of nowhere has the power to be more compelling than the text. "Hey, there's a riot going on!" is less intersting than showing pictures of the riot. But riots are few and far between, mostly. So we'll see what the niche looks like.
... that as long as it's entertaining (and it's not forced on me), I might be interested in it.
:o)
Think about adcritic - it (essentially) shut down because it was too popular (the fact that they couldn't capitalize on people who *wanted* to watch advertisements is another issue, though
I know most of you guys don't, but I choose to watch TV in my family room. On my big plasma TV. Where's the set-top-box that can easily find, select, and play this content? I heard they're doing IPTV for porn sites, are those boxes useful for anything else like this? --D
And you don't need some wierd player, either. The Internet Archive offers video in about five different formats, including editable quality versions for use in other works.
What happened to all those crazy Internet radio stations that used to play short films by new directors?
I remember seeing this movie about a mental patient who met a couple of evangelists on the street, and kept winding one of them up by claiming to be the last angel. Eventually one of the evangelists gets mad, decks the guy and then the sky turns black.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
4mbit down, 384kbps up... typical Comcast cable modem.
;)
1.5mbit down, 128-384kbps up.. typical SBC DSL line.
*Downloading* a video blog might not be too much of a hassle, but *uploading* one is going to turn a lot of people off from it.
Let's not forget all of the poor saps that are still on dialup.
P2P broadcasting isn't new. Pearcast pearcast.(www.peercast.org/) has been doing it for quite a while. The windows client also has OGGCap Video Broadcaster included. It allows you to broadcast in ogg or ogm, the input from a capture card to P2P on the fly or saved to disk, in various quality levels. The yellow page directory is at http://yp.peercast.org/. We've tested peercasting a local public access chanel. Pretty simple actually.
Also, There is a free 24 hour Adult XXX program P2P TV network supported by tv commercial type ads (free registration). http://www.adultinternet.tv/ It uses the same peercast client as the generic peercast above but it's branded. The the generic client works the same except it doesn't direct you the the right yellow pages http://www.adultinternet.tv/yp/. If you use the generic client and go to the yellow pages you don't need to register (which is a stupid requirement).
In order for these to work, you must open port 7144-7145 (which is different from bittorrent) on your router's firewall. Using trigger ports works well as opposed to port forwarding if you have more than one computer on your home network.
We are working on implementing a model that will encourage greater participation (not affiliated with the website that is the subject of this article).
Hasn`t peercast being doing this for about 3 years so far?
theres alot more interesting content on their Yellow pages too. 200+ channels etc.
Who knew the ACT Lab would make Slashdot... Congrats guys!
The Downhill Battle/participatorypolitics.org guys are already doing this.
For those who doesn't know, a lot of people have been using Cool Streaming to watch some Asian sport channels using the same concept as BT. This might be new in that you can actually broadcast something, but in terms of watching TV using BT engine, that's not something totally new.
www.coolstreaming.org
Encrypted Streaming to Xbox over the Internet, described at AVSForum. All you need is a camcorder and ReplayTV to create your own Television Broadcast Network. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=54 9212
They're using University (state) owned equipment, bandwidth, etc.. There are rules about how they can use it. Making money is not allowed, unless they are set up as an "Auxiliary Enterprise" (as with the University's public radio station, KUT). That requires all sorts of funny stuff, like business plans, auditing and picking up the tab for their operation costs (e.g. KUT hosts their site and streams from a private ISP). I wonder if this status has been obtained.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom