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."

Comments

neet

[Amouth]

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.??

Re:neet

[/ASCII]

Same model as any open source software, by offering paid support for people who have endured the programs!

Re:neet

[tomhudson]

2 words:

video spam

I'm joking (I think).

Seriously, how long before the marketroids try to appropriate this? Only time will tell. My bet is it'll be a race between them and Google.

Re:neet

[jpellino]

Must be some ex-Apple. The T-Shirts are available now.
At cost no less! Oh.
Blast. So much for making money.

Live Video is becoming increasingly popular

[ProfaneBaby]

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.

Big Whoop

[14erCleaner]

Wow, it's like public-access cable TV, only world-wide. Whoopee.

Re:Big Whoop

[Trigun]

Hey, some very good programming can be found on cable-access. Many old horror shows came out of local broadcast, and when those channels had to go to networks, the cable access took over. MST3k got its start on local access, and anyone over 40 can remember the local shows featuring clowns showing cartoons on Saturday mornings, and personalities such as the Ghoul or Zacherly, which graced only local markets.

Re:Big Whoop

[/ASCII]

What advantage does this have over regular public-access cable:

• Your show is always on prime time, which probably doubles your audience
  
• Your show is distributed all over the world, which probably increases the audience by an order of magnitude
  
• Once the technology becomes mainstream, more people can watch stuff like this from work, which probably increases your audience by an order of magnitude.
  

So, given the above information, and some usage statistics about public access television, we can conclude that about two hundred people will watch a regular show, and all of them will be the mother of the shows creator.

Re:Big Whoop

[birkhouse]

The point of public access isn't necessarily in the quality of programs as perceived by the mass market public, but rather that it provides what could be construed as quality programming by a narrow niche of the populace. There is probably a public access television program out there for everyone, with the limiting factor being the availability of the resource to the producers of the content. This technology could possibly provide for a nearly unlimited television resource with little oversight. People could therefore produce raunchy cartoons on internet public access as easily as DIY programs are currently screened on channel 13.

Heh

[w.p.richardson]

Internet Cable Access...

Wayne's World! Party time! Excellent!

Re:Heh

[Vobbo]

Actually, a company like BITV is more like internet cable access...

Epileptics beware!

[Scrameustache]

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.

I'm glad

[aonaran]

I was wondering when someone was going to try and organize Creative Commons stuff into a central TV station that people can go to.
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 /. announcement. If there is no media or software to download yet they might not be slashdotted.

Bit Torrent TV

[StreetFire.net]

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

Re:Bit Torrent TV

[Chyeld]

And suddenly we have a world where people can only watch the first half of a show because all the seeds drop off once the show is finished and never upload the last 30 sec to anyone.

No thanks, I'd rather have the current setup where the most rare piece is the highest priority and simply "Tivo" the shows.

Also see Broadcast Machine

[Wesley Felter]

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.

Finally Slashdot Video can start

[Raindeer]

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.

Re:Not convinced

[brontus3927]

You mean like Napoleon Dynamite with a budget of $400,000 including post-production and grossed $44.5m? Or maybe Blair Witch Project whose production budget was $35,000 and had a worldwide gross of over $248m?

The reason most "major" cinema houses don't play more independent films is because more sheep^H^H^H people are interested in seeing the lastest Vin Deisel film or other movie that had such a large advertising budget that you can't escape. Movie theaters want to make money, so they play films that they think will make them the most money. Indies only get played when there's a lull (few major releases come out during the autumn) and they can be gotten for extremely cheap, otherwise, you've got the local multiplex still devoting half their screens to Star Wars a month after release.

I think this has incredible potential, if people get behind it. There is already a huge underground of short films. Unless you subscribe to the Sundance Channel or are a regular to websites like i-film you will very likely never see any of this. BMW films, Google video, ACTLab. The movement is fractured, but it is there. Think of it more like the state of OSS a decade ago

Interesting related link

[mister_llah]

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!

Where is the license text?

[Homology]

I looked around the site for the license, but the closest I could find was :

ACTLab TV is built upon the philosophy of open source and Copyleft media.

An actual license text is appreciated.

Great!

[GMFTatsujin]

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?

Re:build off of what we already have, durnit

[ludwigvan968]

Hi, I am a member of the ACTLab TV team and I wanted to address some things in your post. We are, in fact, using FFMpeg for encoding along with a number of other Open Source and low-cost software packages. We are also currently working on creating guides on how to capture, transcode and publish content for our stream, as well as documentation on how to create original content and manage your own station.

Where's the hardware?

[dspyder]

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

Use the Internet Archive instead

[Animats]

Unlike these new guys, who are all player, no content, visit the Internet Archive Moving Images collection. They have actual content. 5344 open source movies and counting, plus a big collection of historical films.

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.

*Upstream* is not.

[EvilStein]

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. ;)