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

Heh

[w.p.richardson]

Internet Cable Access...

Wayne's World! Party time! Excellent!

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: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