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Skype Founders Develop Media Streaming Tech
[RnP]Venom writes "It appears that after selling Skype to Ebay, Skype founders Janus and Niklas haven't been resting on their laurels. As reported by ZDNet, and the International Herald Tribune, they have been hard at work developing a new TV streaming application called Joost. With as little as 6,000 people currently testing the project details are a bit scarce, but if it does remotely as well as their Phone/IM success, it could be a real treat. From the IHT article: 'Joost may eventually try to move onto television sets, but the company said it will initially focus on making it easier and more fun to watch TV on a computer. Similar to the Skype model, Joost users will download free software -- this time to help them browse for channels and clips they're interested in. One of the company's executives, Henrik Werdelin, said in a videotaped interview that Joost aims to keep the quality of television programming, its picture quality and its ease of use, but improve other aspects.'"
They just changed the name from "The Venice Project" to Joowhatever. Not much new developement to write about.
Will it work on those too? Or it's another "5Gb Internet connection needed" ?
http://naerey.switch-case.org
Skype Founders Develop Media Streaming Tech
An obvious progression, as skype, which uses screaming media tech, was a huge success.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Sounds like Democracy. Except Democracy is an open platform (I assume this new thing will not be).
Developers: We can use your help.
With so many different delivery systems starting to get good, legal content and both the big tech companies and the content producers joining the fight this should be interesting. Now if only we could get around the DRM that limits most content to windows machines.
This has been on Slashdot a couple of times before. I'm wondering where they'll get the content from. In fact, I'm not sure who sources the content in a technical sense. Since it's those guys, I'd assume the source is a peer, and not a central server. Or is it a central server, with peers just helping with the distribution?
Anyway, they'll have a hard time delivering a TV like experience without TV like content. Purely YouTube style short movies won't cut it. Maybe they're building on the peers redistributing copyrighted content, but that didn't work out to well in the end for Kazaa.
Maybe they'll convince movie/TV studios to distribute their content, but what's in it for them? Ads?
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Skype Founders Develop Media Streaming Tech
Maybe it's just my imagination kicking in... but don't we already have media streaming already?
When Skype developed their phone/IM software, voice over IP was in its infancy. Skype was leading edge stuff. However, the internet has had video streaming for a while now. I don't see how this is going to fly, unless they're cutting some deals with the studios to get some content, or have some spiffy new compression algorithm.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It could be true, one day, that Joost really do(es) control the media.
(Bad joke from one of the Joost, BTW)
The following is off the Joost FAQ Page (requires a login ID):
You think skype uses bandwidth, wait till users using this get on your corporate network and get selected as "super nodes".....
They really videotaped the interview? Seems pretty crappy to use friggen videotape when your in the streaming video business.... wtf???
All that is needed now is a mobile toilet or something and you won't have to leave your computer.
EvAR!
Of course, I guess you could wear depends.
What is that people have with trying to "wed TV to the PC"? TV is pretty much crap, the more channels the more crap, it has little to commend it. The nice thing about the Internet is that it's easier to avoid crap. What's really needed is an easy way for people to automatically filter out the 98% of TV that should never have been made in the first place.
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A lot of TV may be crap, but there's still enough quality TV that I can't even watch it all and keep a reasonable schedule of doing other things. That's good enough for me. If you don't like it, don't watch it or talk about it.
"Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare -- a pumpkin with a gun."
Most television programming sucks. (Note how I said most, not all.) They probably have something going with the whole 'watch when you want to watch' streaming method, but isn't that the luxury of the internet? I choose what content I want to view, when I want to view it. It sounds very similar to TiVo and the like, except it runs off a computer. I could be overgeneralizing or mistaken, but I doubt that this whole 'streaming revolution' will really change my lack of interest in generic television, movies, and music.
Sometimes I wonder if I think too much.
It seems as though they are following in the steps of GMail and building a customer base via exclusive invitation.
or rather, it would have it's place if it's current implementations didn't suck so bad.
i wish that some provider (other than bittorrent) could come up with a way to get releases out on par and on time with a DVD release. most movies i want to watch once or twice and then move on. renting from the video store is ok, but there are logistical hurdles such as avalaibility. if there were a service that could put movies on my HTPC within a day or two of their respective DVDs dropping, i would be quite interested.
the way the system works now, i have to get a disc from netflix/blockbuster online or go to the video store and rent it, which would work if i could get the disc when i walked into the store, but if it is a very recent release (less than a week) it's out of stock and i have to wait. my alternatives are to get a rip of some sort from bit torrent, but there are 0dayz issues with that much akin to the avalability issues i have with physical media. unless there is a screener or the DVDrip hits the scene before the retail release, the wait is shorter, but involves a bit more work (download, seed, extract, maybe even patch and/or encode, then burn) which is fine for something you want to keep, but is a bit involved for something i'm gong to watch once and hand off to friend.
so, if i could get a cheap stream with little or no wait, within a day or two of the video hitting store shelves i would be interested. if the quality of the film warrants it, i can obtain a copy later by other means and under other terms based on convenience and price (BT, rent and rip, used/bargain bin, or gaffle a friend's copy), and in the rare case of an epic classic, pay retail for a copy or a kewl box set. but for TV series and disposable releases like "dude where's my car?" i just want to watch it when it becomes available and move on to the next thing. that seems to be where streaming from the internet comes into play.
the problem with the current crop of stream/dowload.on demand services is that they all suck. they either lack selection (vongo), lack timely release (in the case of PPV and VOD from the cable company) or require some sort of phone home player that i don't want on my HTPC (everything else), and/or cost as much as a video store rental.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
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My comments on this thread so far:
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Streaming video over dial-up is just not possible. Unless perhaps the resolution is 80x60 and frame rate is 2fps.
Myself, I have to use flashblock and disable images in Firefox to browse the web with any efficiency these days. You'd be suprised how many pages have absolutely zero text on them whatsoever, using only flash and images to deliver content. Tards.
(however, I have to allow images from images.slashdot.org for the captcha to post anonymously here)
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Sounds like a pretty large and widespread test to me. I do not consider 6000 people a small number.
I still will never trust the developers of Kazaa. Spyware/Malware bundlers just cannot be trusted, ever.
I tell people to avoid Skype like the plague. TeamSpeak and the old RogerWilco still work just fine for me and I know that they do not contain any malware. I cannot say the same for Kazaa spinoff turds.
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Bullshit. I have RogerWilco installs that date back to '94. It is still a superior technology.
unfortunately the non-disclosure agreement I clicked through prevents me from discussing it. All I can say is that I'm generally happy with it but won't be giving up anime fansubs anytime soon, especially the faux-720p h264 ones....
;-)
Sorry wish I could say more.
Prepare to Joost
Boozard Bait!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Ecstatic by their new name... no, not really. I feel strangely violated :)
(Joost is a very common Dutch forename)
All you really need is a BT client designed to hide all the complexity of finding content and downloading with BT, an associated server farm that makes sure the torrent is always well seeded by fast machines (for paying clients), and some tweaks to make BT favor sending files start to end in case of media files that can be streamed.
;)
My solution is a BT client implemented as a signed Java applet. You don't even have to install special software on your computer - just visit my website. I cheat and don't make it easy for people to stop sharing files they've downloaded and I do things to make them want to stay hooked up so that as much as possible the users foot the bandwidth needs. Now if only I had funding.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Joost, formerly known as The Venice Project, gets most of its "cool factor" in the geek circles from being built over the Mozilla XUL Runner. In other words, its client is based on XUL, SVG, JavaScript and XPCOM, just like Firefox, as outlined in this article.
There's a browser safer than Firefox, it is Firefox, with NoScript
Does this mean we can finally look forward to skipping, randomly disconnecting streaming video?
Wait... we already have that. The only real advantage to Skype is that it can call landlines. It's nice for that, but it's not like their streaming is that hot... just their ability to use a simple trick to open a port on a firewall.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There must be something new and exciting about this or it wouldn't be on /. right? So far I haven't been able to find out what it is. Sounds like TV on PC. I hope that's not what it really is. When I want to watch TV I prefer my 42" unit in my living room. The stuff I see on the net is crap! IMHO.
the beta is restricted to a platform for which i only have one working machine and that machine is not up to the challenge hardware wise. i wish i couldi have seen is the splash screen. but it is quite a splash screen!
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
I just recently was able to get off dialup and man, I feel your pain, I have seen way too many of those useless blob pages-nothing there! Turn off insecure JS scripting, images and flash and -nothing on the page!
It seems web"masters" might test against different browsers, but they sure don't test against different connection speeds or with lower quality even marginally older equipment. It's likie a t a minimum you have to be on a cable modem with a 21 inch screen or they don't want you to use your page at all or something. Screw that! I remember seeing pages where it took more than a minute to finish rendering if you wanted all the goodies to show up. sucks. A real "master" could make it so a much wider range of people using different machines and connection speeds could use his pages.
Then,if all you want is the text, it still sucks, the "print this page" low-res version (even if they have it) can't be found until after you download the full page. I wish there was an automatic plugin and standard for that, so if you mash a link and have low res selected it would just redirect there. Why isn't this out there yet? Seems pretty useful. Maybe the disabled community could force the issue or something, seems a natural for them as well.
I think they should make all of these alleged "masters" (I call them web manglers) test against dialup speeds on a 15 inch screen with some machine from around 5 years ago. Those era computers are still way common. Either that or follow "useabilty" guidelines, that helps make dialup useable, like stop with the lame javascript links and images with no alt text. Is it all that hard really to provide real normal links and some alternative text for the images?
Anyway, lookup "links-hacked", try that for a generic browser instead of FF on slow dialup speeds. Even if you have the horsepower in your machine, the slow download speed makes it painful to use full bloat browsers (FF is full bloat no matter what anyone says, it just is) on full bloat webpages. It has some tab action and will render images. I've used it on old pentium 1 machines before with 16 megs RAM, works great, speeds things up considerably, moreso than any other browser I have tried. It's not perfect but it is darn useful.
The beta is high quality. Suddenly I can watch a dozen channels of nearly TV quality content, which currently is strictly per-episode on-demand P2P streaming (more scalable not-on-demand P2P "multicast channel" type streaming will come only later). And there are ads, a business model and commercial TV programs (Fith Gear car shows and GONG anime being the best ones). Picture quality is surprisingly good, so is tolerance of bad connections. Compared to podcasting it is really fun to be able to access everything RIGHT NOW! In practice it beats Democracy every possible way. The content comes primarily from P2P to other clients, but Joost company has seeding "Long Tail Servers" to gurantee the availability of even the less popular streams.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
Joost Posthuma called, he wants his name back.
Joost is based on Mozilla's XUL Runner framework .
Dirk-Willem van Gulik from Apache the Foundation is the CTO .
Some of the Open source tech used
Apache, Cocoon, Dojo, Jena, Mozilla, RDF, SVG, XML, XUL
http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/
http://ant.apache.org/
http://wicket.sourceforge.net/
http://lucene.apache.org/
I dunno, but the caption description sounds a lot like what I've been doing with VLC. Quite a nice little open source app that seems PC/Linux/Mac friendly.
It's as simple as this:
VLC > Playlist > Discover streaming services > TV Shoutcast
(I'm not sure if that's the exact menu path as I don't have it handy at work, but it gives a good idea.)
Then go browsing stuff that appears on the playlist and see what's on. More often than not, its stuff that's on TV outside of the U.S. Sometimes its fun to see what there is outside of the "Mcmedia-sphere", even though I don't have a clue as to what they're saying. (Japan is weird, and Germany seems to have a lot of parties/raves.) Plenty of live webcams and experimental (think public-access cable) stuff too, if foriegn TV isn't your thing.
Quality heavily depends on the broadcast stream. It varies greatly. Some feeds are crappy little 320x240 windows with artifacts that cut out frequently. Then some feeds are great for fullscreen XGA video (on a decent cable connection). It's almost like being in the UHF days, but with the other guy's upload bandwidth/latency rather than signal strength determining what picture you can get.
So is there any significant difference other than being locked in to one stream format/codec, and using a proprietary software?