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BitTorrent Live's 'Cable Killer' P2P Video App Finally Hits iOS (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the better-late-than-never dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: BitTorrent has now done for live video what it did for file downloads: invented peer-to-peer technology that moves the burden of data transfer from a centralized source to the crowd. Instead of cables and satellites, BitTorrent piggybacks on the internet bandwidth of its users. Since P2P live streaming is so much cheaper than traditional ways to deliver live content, BitTorrent could pay channel owners more for distribution per viewer. And BitTorrent can offer that content to viewers for free or much cheaper than a cable subscription. The transfer technology and the app that aggregates these channels are both called BitTorrent Live. Now, almost a year after the protocol's debut on smart TVs, and six months after it was supposed to arrive on iPhone, the BitTorrent Live app quietly became available on iOS this week. Until now it's only existed on Mac, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV -- much less popular platforms. And that's after being in development since 2009. The app features 15 channels, including NASA TV, France One, QVC Home and TWiT (This Week In Tech) that you can watch live. The latency is roughly 10 seconds, which could be faster than terrestrial cable, as well as systems like Sling TV that can delay content more than a minute. The problem right now is that BitTorrent Live has a pretty lackluster channel selection. It's still working on striking deals with more name-brand channels. It could offer some for pay-per-view, but cheaper than the same content on traditional TV due to the reduced broadcasting costs.

37 comments

  1. This will fail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Anything labeled a (blank)-killer flops. It's stupid and needs to stop.

    1. Re: This will fail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Trump was labeled the Hillary-killer. Then he won.

    2. Re: This will fail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He raped her. Figuratively speaking in her case. He saves real rape for the good looking ones. Want a Tic Tac?

  2. Irrelevant by klingens · · Score: 2

    Bittorrent will not supplant current methods. The transmission costs are marginal. What costs the real money are the right to transmit, ie. licensing fees. Only for "free" content, the transmission costs matter, things like youtube or as here, public channels, shopping channels, etc. ie where the content is free or pretty much worthless.
    Besides: streaming via bittorrent exists for quite some time now, but as all things bittorrent which is at the actual technical edge, it's streaming illegal content: Popcorn Time streams movies, tv shows, etc. for at least 2 years now.

    1. Re: Irrelevant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      YouTube is the largest music site on the web. I can download any song off of YouTube for free. How is it worthless?

    2. Re:Irrelevant by ArylAkamov · · Score: 1

      I wouldn't say that. Even putting aside legal troubles, that is a whole hell of a lot of bandwidth, which is why youtube takes a loss and no competitors have popped up.

      If a p2p alternative was made, and made EASY TO ACCESS, I could see it really taking off.

    3. Re:Irrelevant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have to agree. A big part of Netflix' need to increase prices is their interconnect fees.

    4. Re: Irrelevant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      even on 4g it will be bottlenecked and single host via conventinal methods are fine for it at this time. most people have data limits too.

  3. invented p2p? by ooloorie · · Score: 1

    invented peer-to-peer technology that moves the burden of data transfer from a centralized source to the crowd.

    Modern P2P file sharing arguably started with Napster and eDonkey in 1999, not BitTorrent. But even those systems really just represented a mass market adoption of earlier methods that people had used to share files on the Internet and even on USENET.

    1. Re:invented p2p? by ckatko · · Score: 1

      "Peer-to-peer technology" has existed since like... some of the first network games.

      DOOM ran peer-to-peer.

      Fun fact: As soon as they launched it they went "Oh shit, that means anyone who hacks their... can cheat? What have we done?!" (John Romero on a GDC talk) Quake would be client-server after that. Quakeworld was the first (or one of the first) major game to support latency compensation. Quake was completely tested "in house" on LANs and their dedicated T1/T3 or whatever and when people tried to play on their crappy 28.8K modems it was a disaster. People forget that not only have modems gotten better, but the infrastructure of the internet itself has gotten WORLDS more reliable and fast.

      But now I'm going pretty far off-topic.

    2. Re:invented p2p? by ckatko · · Score: 1

      I guess if I'm splitting hairs, peer-to-peer likely predated any games too. I should have worded that better to point out that a major, well-known product was running peer-to-peer a LONG time ago.

    3. Re:invented p2p? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      splitting heirs

    4. Re:invented p2p? by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

      I view it in generations:

      Generation zero: Pre-p2p. Dump sites, BBSs, FTP servers.
      Generation one: Fully centralised control/search, distributed hosting: Napster, early bittorrent, kazaa/fasttrack, ED2K
      Generation two: Decentralised or fully distributed: Kad, bittorrent with DHT, gnutella.

    5. Re:invented p2p? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      early bittorrent

      I'd like to remind you that it took almost a decade before any big site started using magnet, and DHT-only still sucks in 2017.

    6. Re:invented p2p? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      l0l

  4. France One by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    The app features 15 channels, including NASA TV, France One

    Is "France One" supposed to be TF1? It seems the web does not know anything about "France One"

  5. great for popular linux ISOs, other stuff..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My experience about a decade ago, was that bittorrent was great for recent, popular Linux ISOs. For unpopular stuff, good luck, you'll need it.

    1. Re:great for popular linux ISOs, other stuff..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's because shared folder P2P applications are superior, unfortunately the worse technology prevailed.
      But ed2k is still alive

  6. Won't work by buss_error · · Score: 1

    ISVs are already shutting down ports between customers. Also billing for every byte into or out of the router - including DDoS traffic.

    TWC blocked ports above 1024 between their regional lans. If you were in Chicago, you could hit say port 4800 in Dallas. But if you were in Houston, you couldn't hit 4800 in Austin, but Chicago was just fine.

    Spectrum bought out TWC and I don't have nearly the trouble any more, but that's not saying service prices aren't going up, because - Lookie there! - they are. I will say that packet loss is down by a large factor after the takeover.

    --
    Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
    1. Re:Won't work by SuricouRaven · · Score: 2

      You are quite right. Are we expecting cable companies to just willingly foot the distribution costs for a service that competes with them? So long as BitTorrent Live is a niche little thing, they will ignore it - but if it takes off, you can bet that 'traffic management' will become suddenly a much bigger concern for them.

      Maybe if the election had gone the other way the FCC might have been able to make them play nice for a time, but eventually they would find a way around any regulation.

      The big joke to me is that, if someone were willing to foot the bill, it would be possible to establish an open distributed caching infrastructure would would bring the distribution cost down to practically nothing for everyone - base it off something like IPFS, or even usenet, where every ISP runs a cache server of content-addressed data. But that'll never happen, because 1. No company will pay to run a server that their competitors can benefit from and 2. No ISP wants to run a server that will host anything people want because of the legal considerations. There's a reason that most ISPs have now dropped USENET service, and it isn't cost.

    2. Re:Won't work by buss_error · · Score: 1
      Are we expecting cable companies to just willingly foot the distribution costs...

      .
      Since I pay my ISV for transit, yes, I expect them to actually provide the service I'm (over) paying them for. This is frequently the logical fallacy employed by telecoms when they describe people that use their transit as "data hogs not paying their fair share".

      Operational costs of a network like a cable or telephone system are quite low. The real cost is in the network establishment, which is paid for by the builders of the neighborhood the home is built in, then given to the ISV (cable or telephone) once the area is nearing completion. The same is true for streets, side walks, power, water, gas, and sewers.

      I am, of course, leaving out provisioning of content because for Internet, I don't need (or actually want) content from the cable or telephone company.

      Maybe if the election had gone the other way the FCC might have been able to make them play nice for a time, but eventually they would find a way around any regulation.

      Yes, exactly. The only way to beat the telecoms into providing an honest service at a price point that isn't usurious is to eliminate the monopoly rents and barriers to entry granted to them by law.

      --
      Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
  7. Given that net neutrality is about to go pop by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    and the expansion of data caps that will probably follow I don't think this is going to matter much...

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  8. for iOS really? by beckett · · Score: 1

    Does this streaming use the bittorrent client? If this is relying on mobile devices to seed and peer, Can't wait to max out all 4GB of monthly mobile data 10 minutes into the next Walking Dead premiere.

    'piggybacking on the bandwidth of users' is not such a problem if it's a desktop app, but how does that work for mobile users with tiny data caps (e.g. all of canada)

    1. Re:for iOS really? by jpatters · · Score: 1

      You can disallow cellular data on an app-by-app basis.

      --
      "Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
  9. So it's another version of AceStream? by BenJeremy · · Score: 1

    AceStream has been around and just works. Lots of streaming sports and live shows, just not much "legit" programming.

  10. Too much bandwidth for mobile by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Are you really going to let a peer to peer application use up your limited hi-speed/LTE data to offer data to your sharing peers? Unless this service allows you to be a pure leach while on a metered connection its going to be far too bandwidth hungry.

  11. Not available for Linux??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So I thought I'd give it a try but it is not available for linux?? WTF??

  12. what protocol by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "a year after the protocol's debut..."

    Has the protocol been published somewhere?

    or "protocol" is a used in marketing for this slashvertisement?

  13. hahahahaha by Revek · · Score: 3, Funny

    Small cable here. We already have cord cutters coming back for video. Seems like a netflix, amazon and hulu accounts eats up you're pocket book just as much as a cable subscription does. Not to mention any premium content you may want like HBO or showtime. I hate to say I told you so, no really don't hate that.

    1. Re:hahahahaha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You aren't winning the cord cutters back. While there may be some returning customers people are going to adopt piracy in the long term. Cable companies suck as do the entertainment industry parasites that "own" the content you license. Right now you have an older population that didn't grow up with technology like we have it today. The younger generation getting older isn't going to switch back.

    2. Re:hahahahaha by EvilSS · · Score: 1

      Small cable here. We already have cord cutters coming back for video. Seems like a netflix, amazon and hulu accounts eats up you're pocket book just as much as a cable subscription does. Not to mention any premium content you may want like HBO or showtime. I hate to say I told you so, no really don't hate that.

      Yea, OK. I pay $42 a month for Hulu, Netflix, HBO Now, and Amazon Prime. Including Prime is a bit over the top since I had prime before I cut the cord, but let's put it in there for a worst-case. That covers 99% of my TV watching. My locals I can get over the air and if I need, I can always grab a OTA DVR but as of now it's not really something I've needed. When I cancelled my cable, I was paying about $75 a month for just the TV content.

      Plus, unlike cable, I can easily cut and re-add services as I see fit. I can cancel HBO, then add it for a month to binge Westworld or Game of Thrones, then cancel it again. Easy-peasy. No phone calls, no bullshit contracts. Just click and done. Want it again, click. done. If I feel the need for more channels, I could always add Sling, Vue, or DirectTV Now for much less than it would cost to get it from my cable provider. And if I don't like it, click, done.

      --
      I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
  14. asymmetric DSL and Cable connections. by goombah99 · · Score: 1

    Another possible achilles heel here is that these days most household connections are asymmetric with piddly upload rates. You actually need the upload rate to just to negotiate the download requests too. So one will need to have vastly greater numbers of seeders than viewers for this to work using the edge of the network.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  15. It's bitztream by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    the autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating Slashdot troll!!

  16. Re: Nice Try by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Clearly you are no networking engineer, a pirating protocol? So you are calling the Norwegian State television a pirate station because they are transmitting their programming via bittorrent? You need to get a grip, bittorrent is a decentralized data transmission protocol nothing more nothing less, your feeble attempt at delegitimizing innovation are disgusting and unenlightned and you should crawl back to the sewer where you came from. Just because you only have imagination for misuse it does not mean other humans are as depraved as you!

  17. Donald Trump TV? by FemmyV · · Score: 1

    Fox News, One America, WealthTV ... Open News TV maybe to offer balance, well, not exactly when it's 3:1