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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
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.
And Skype itself was an obvious progression from P2P media transfer.
These are the same guys that did Kazaa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype for the curious
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
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!
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".....
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."
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.
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.
I still will never trust the developers of Kazaa. Spyware/Malware bundlers just cannot be trusted, ever.
Kazaa did not contain spyware/malware until it was bought by Sharman Networks. Skype is a very well made program. Can you use Roger Wilco to call a landline? Can you get a phone number assigned to Roger Wilco and call someone on their computer? How about popping into chat mode and sending a file or url?
You don't have to love them or use their products, but IMO they have been putting out some very good, easy to use products and deserve some credit for innovative ideas, and their ability to take those ideas and turn them into a really smooth piece of tech.
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 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/