Roll Your Own Television Network Using Bittorrent 252
Cryofan writes "Mark Pesce, lecturer at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) writes here and here about using p2p networks, specifically bittorrent, to create a grassroots television network. He cites as an example the BBC's "Flexible TV" internet broadcasting model using that as the core of a "new sort of television network, one which could harness the power of P2P distribution to create a global television network." Producers of video entertainment and news would provide a single copy of a program into the network of P2P clients, and the p2p network peers distribute the content themselves. Thus, a virtual 'newswiki' where the content is distributed bittorrent using some sort of 'trusted peer' or moderator mechanisms as a filtering/evaluation mechanism. So what is stopping anyone from doing this now? Awareness of the concept, perhaps? Lack of broadband connections? Lack of business models for content producers?"
Content (Score:5, Insightful)
upstream quota (Score:5, Insightful)
How about the average broadband connection having an upstream quota cap. 1.5GB of upstream traffic a month for me, and not a byte more unless I "contribute" a generous amount to my ISP.
This is still one of the major issues for me when it comes to ISPs. If I would download something popular from bittorrent or edonkey, 1.5GB is absolutely nothing. So the only solution would be if I were to firewall incoming connection and be a leech, or put QOS on all traffic going out, limiting it to 0.5K/s.
This all is of course hypothetically speaking... ;)
How do you advertise? (Score:5, Insightful)
Producing even a basic news show still costs money, even if all the people running it are volunteers.
Still too hard for the average user (Score:5, Insightful)
mass tv over p2p? (Score:2, Insightful)
The Real Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
M
OMG WHY NOT PPL! (Score:1, Insightful)
OMG TEH MAN HE DOES NOT LIKE P2P! THIZ NEW IDEA IZ PROOF! EVERY T>V MUST USE P2P, BITORRENT IZ JEZ"US! I HATH PROVEN THE MAN HATEZ GOOD IDEAZ!!!!!!! HAR HAR! DOWN WITH CORPORATIONS Who WATZE!
when in reality no one has really considered the concept in all actuality. and for some reason the author fails to notice, could make the whole idea worthless anyway. but we get an interesting slashdot read.......
Re:How do you advertise? (Score:3, Insightful)
One little problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Waiting too long for a show (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Content (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree, and frankly, what is availible usually isn't very good so it requires a lot of "filtering" to find much you like. I think that this will change, though, once artists realize they can make money more directly.
Bittorrent is not the right way to do this (Score:5, Insightful)
All of the P2P networks have this problem because they are connection-based and on-demand. A TV network is not on-demand, it's a fixed message delivered on a published schedule. That's the model that works most efficiently, making the most efficient use of the transport medium. For the internet you can be somewhat flexible and start redundant broadcasts at staggered time intervals, but in general, if you don't start listening/downloading when the stream starts, tough.
For compressed video you need to make sure that there are plenty of I-frames in the stream so that people can come in at any arbitrary point and sync up, but that's no big deal. Also if you take this approach you don't need to broadcast multiple streams of the same content at different resolutions/bitrates, the network itself will provide rate reduction by dropping frames that the receiver can't pick up fast enough. (Tho doing that will make the audio pretty noisy; I guess you can do low bandwidth streams if you really want to. Or just do separate bandwidth streams for the audio. That way if one audio stream needs too much bandwidth and is losing too many packets you can just select a lower bandwidth stream instead.)
I'd like to see a NPR/PBS style approach (Score:4, Insightful)
The AFTRS (Score:2, Insightful)
Simon.
Re:Bittorrent is not the right way to do this (Score:3, Insightful)
Live feeds have their purpose, but I'm having trouble seeing how they would work well under a bittorrent system. It could be set up under a telephone tree model, where node A feeds nodes B C and D, which each provide feeds to five or six other nodes. There could even be some redundancy built in so that a dropped packet to node D doesn't propagate to all its clients.
But for things where time isn't critical (read: 90% of what we watch on TV), Bittorrent is ideal. Unlike normal Internet broadcasts, supply scales with demand. Even a delay of a few minutes should be adequate for most purposes.
Want everyone to watch your thingy at exactly the same time? Send it out to all the nodes that want it in some encrypted format, then when enough nodes are seeded to meet demand, distribute the key.
Varying quality streams are possible within a single stream. For example, with Ogg Vorbis, you can get a low-quality stream from a high quality stream just by removing portions of the stream (no re-encoding necessary).
I think all your objections can be overcome,
Re:Bittorrent is not the right way to do this (Score:1, Insightful)
That's an argument for multi-casting. BitTorrent doesn't stream, period. The part of the file you're being given at any time is effectively random. You're just as likely to have 5 seconds of high quality video as you are to have 15 seconds of low quality video. With multi-casting, the video is pushed out in a known order. If a few packets get dropped, then you just have a low-quality stream, but you still have a stream. With BitTorrent, you never know what you have until you have the whole file.
It's just a question of what your requirements are. BitTorrent is an all or nothing protocol, but you can get it any time. Multi-casting is, you get it as it comes, but you know what's coming. For video, I think people really do want the video ASAP, and can give up some quality if they need to.