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."

TSS

I'd expect to see The Screen Savers switch to this format, instead of a podcast.

neet

sounds like a winner if they don't make it too mushed up.. but how are they going to make money to keep it alive.??

Re:neet

Same model as any open source software, by offering paid support for people who have endured the programs!

Re:neet

2 words:

video spam

I'm joking (I think).

Seriously, how long before the marketroids try to appropriate this? Only time will tell. My bet is it'll be a race between them and Google.

Live Video is becoming increasingly popular

Note the launch of Vobbo [vobbo.com] (live video blogs) as an example.

Bandwidth is cheap. Disk space is cheap. Video is going to be very big, very soon.

Big Whoop

Wow, it's like public-access cable TV, only world-wide. Whoopee.

Heh

Internet Cable Access...

Wayne's World! Party time! Excellent!

Epileptics beware!

Why do they feel the need to surround their text with agressivly flashing graphics?

I couldn't get past the first paragraph before I'd had enough of this. Call me back when they offer a non-stroboscopic version of their content.

I'm glad

I was wondering when someone was going to try and organize Creative Commons stuff into a central TV station that people can go to.
The name isn't very good. ACTLab doesn't feel like a name for a place to go for media... but that's ok.

Good timing on the /. announcement. If there is no media or software to download yet they might not be slashdotted.

Community TV.... except its digital.

This reminds me of the dinky little community station we have around here that use and abuse public domain TV shows as much as they can. Except this one is digital. There is a lot of great content out there, as long as the people who made it don't want much money for it.

The main problem here is the competition. There are a lot of other p2p places that don't charge a cent. They just happen to be illegal though.

How long before....

guys start streaming copyrighted stuff via P2P streams? This technology may be shot down by the *.AAs as evil, because it could be used for piracy.

Bit Torrent TV

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:Bit Torrent TV

And suddenly we have a world where people can only watch the first half of a show because all the seeds drop off once the show is finished and never upload the last 30 sec to anyone.

No thanks, I'd rather have the current setup where the most rare piece is the highest priority and simply "Tivo" the shows.

Also see Broadcast Machine

Broadcast Machine [participatoryculture.org] is a similar thing (which I'm sure has been mentioned on Slashdot before), but it's not live. I'm not really sure what the benefit of the live broadcast model is when the Internet can better support a video-on-demand model.

In Austin TX.....

Expect to see a lot of college porn. I can see a new industry, P2P UT Pr0n

So..

How long until the rest of you non-austiners get to watch some OBT productions? (Anyone familure with Austin's public access should have atleast seen some of his shows. Ol' Bitty was the most longing ran one that I remember, Currently doing Clown Time.

Of course, the reason his shows are so good is they're uncensored un-prescreened call in with the random locals that are up at 1am. This will kind of take that community feel away.

Exciting! Can't wait for how it'll evolve

I wonder what would happen if they managed to incorporate subscription fees or other pay models into the software?

I'm thinking such a move would generate a humongous business opportunity for all involved.

Finally Slashdot Video can start

Snif, I still miss Slashdot Radio. But now, thanks to this technology we can get Slashdot video. We will be able to see Cowboyneal and CmdrTaco getting it on in one great geek lovefest on geek subjects.

But really, Slashdot Radio was one of those "programs" a group of people worldwide listened too, just because it was there and it appealed to them. This kind of technology makes this possible for others as well. Sure you might not be interested in the Dutch Open Student competition rock climbing, but a couple of hundred people might. Peer to peer makes it possible to distribute footage without reducing your upstream to one bit/second/customer.

BTW BBC makes use of Kontiki for their peer to peer distribution of their TV programs and I can see other public TV starting that as well. There is no other way you can easily let 1 million people download the 8 o'clock news beteween 20:10 and 00:10 without jamming your internet connection.

Peer to peer is the holy grail of networking.

all we need now is adequate upstrem bandwidth

sub 384kbps upstream BW on USA 'broadband' service is blocking a huge opportunity for small scale P2P broadcasting. Heck, BW is so tight that decent quality stereo audio via distributed distribution is impractical nigh impossible...

of course you won't be seeing any upstream broadband, even though it's technically possible and as cheap to add to docsis 2 systems as additional downstream. why? because it foils the 'we are in control of broadcasting' mindset of the providers.

what we need is some rules similar to early telephone de-reg that allow 3rd parties to tilize cable channels just like they use telephone infrastructure.

fat chance.

Interesting related link

I read through this a bit and got to think that I was surprised that ABC, CBS, and NBC haven't already tried to do this (since they get their revenue from advertising, this would expand their advertising base)... so I decided to look to see if they had even planned to do it. I didn't find anything on plans for them to offer web broadcasts, however I did find this...

http://mediahopper.com/portal.htm [mediahopper.com]
An information hub for international live and pre-recorded web broadcasts.... apparantely this is not such a new concept (and the few I checked out seemed to only require the Windows Media Player, though I'm sure some use Real Player)

Cheers!

Where is the license text?

I looked around the site for the license, but the closest I could find was :

ACTLab TV is built upon the philosophy of open source and Copyleft media.

An actual license text is appreciated.

Torrent Anyone ?

Anyone has the torrent ?

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Please forgive the poster, he's not in a good mood.

Winamp?

Winamp already does this with their Media Library. They have near hundreds of streams from people, it definatly worth a look. I mean, how else can you watch simpsons, futurama, and seinfeld while at work?

Free Speech Alert!!

Q. Who gets to decide what content gets shown?

The members of the ACTLab TV community sort through submissions and organize them into thematically-related programs. While we won't be able to show everything we're given, we will go through it all and serve you the very best. To learn more about the people who run ACTLab TV stop by our PEOPLE page.

Well, we shall see just how far they support the concept of free speech..
I see people go on all the time about it but they only REALLY support free speech that THEY agree with.
When it comes to content they find disagreeable, all of a sudden the censorship nazis appear from the woodwork..

Great!

I like that projects like these are under active development and getting a lot of attention.

I have to ask, though, why require the download of yet *another* media application to use it?

Would it be possible to make a plugin of the protocol for gstreamer, WMP, or any of the already established multimedia players?

build off of what we already have, durnit

To really get traction, these people are going to have to get people to encode video for their special system, get people to install their special system and get their friends to do the same.

However, there are pieces already out there for this sort of thing that people are already using. RSS to track a program for new episodes. Bittorrent to distribute. FFMpeg (and others) for codec/format support.

There is no practical reason to reinvent the wheel as far as these basic components. But there is a very practical reason NOT to do so. These video files are going to seep into other networks. People in this system are going to want to watch content they get from other networks. If we're looking to build a real alternative... a competitive alternative to the way TV works now, we can't have the distribution and viewing infrastructure fragmented. We need there to be a level of standardizatoin so content creators can export to a set of formats that everybody can play. We need a distribution channel that everybody can use. There needs to be a critical mass of regularly updated content people can "tune in" to before people will be motivated do so.

Machine/BlogTorrent are great examples. Different projects that both leverage the same technologies and in so doing, are compatible with the same distribution/discovery network. And you'll notice people are already downloading TV shows (albeit illegally) via BT and playing them on their desktops... so people are even willing to do this "manually" without the aid of a fancypants fron end.

This chain of tools is doing the job very well. There is no practical reason to fragment the distribution channel/audience when the infrastructure is already in place for grassroots TV distro to reach critical mass.

In short... Beta is already deployed, why introduce VHS? It's not about which technology is better. It's about stealing viewers from members of the MPAA. And the tech is already there.

I think that the technical bits that are still to be worked on are making the existing channel more user-friendly to install and operate. If you want to scratch the grassroots TV itch, there's plenty of work to do on the client side and the human interface bits. If you're more of a diplomat than a coder, take a stab at getting people to agree on a common file format for the vids.

Coolstreaming

Coolstreaming is another application that uses p2p idea for realtime TV. It's developed by a guy in Hong Kong. It's been around for quite some time. Yeah they used it for cable TV there with thousands of users and really good streaming quality, so they're now shut down due to copyright issue.

http://www.coolstreaming.org/ [coolstreaming.org]

Where's the hardware?

I know most of you guys don't, but I choose to watch TV in my family room. On my big plasma TV. Where's the set-top-box that can easily find, select, and play this content? I heard they're doing IPTV for porn sites, are those boxes useful for anything else like this? --D

Use the Internet Archive instead

Unlike these new guys, who are all player, no content, visit the Internet Archive Moving Images collection [archive.org]. They have actual content. 5344 open source movies and counting, plus a big collection of historical films.

And you don't need some wierd player, either. The Internet Archive offers video in about five different formats, including editable quality versions for use in other works.

Those crazy hippy psychadelic radio stations

What happened to all those crazy Internet radio stations that used to play short films by new directors?

I remember seeing this movie about a mental patient who met a couple of evangelists on the street, and kept winding one of them up by claiming to be the last angel. Eventually one of the evangelists gets mad, decks the guy and then the sky turns black.

peercast?

Hasn`t peercast [peercast.org] being doing this for about 3 years so far?

theres alot more interesting content on their Yellow pages [peercast.org] too. 200+ channels etc.

Basically like Cool streaming?

For those who doesn't know, a lot of people have been using Cool Streaming to watch some Asian sport channels using the same concept as BT. This might be new in that you can actually broadcast something, but in terms of watching TV using BT engine, that's not something totally new.

www.coolstreaming.org

Re:Not convinced

You mean like Napoleon Dynamite [imdb.com] 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 [ifilm.com] 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