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