Peercasting Ready for Primetime?

ZephyrXero writes "Have you ever wanted to run your own internet radio or TV station, but thought the bandwidth would cost too much? While Wired thinks Peer-to-peer broadcasting, or "peercasting", will be the future of the internet (previously posted); Peercast.org says it's already here today. Peercast's software is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac. You can broadcast both audio and video without needing a whole lot of bandwidth since each audience member also uploads back to the network. The Xiph Foundation is also working on a similar project called "IceShare," but it's still in planning. Peercast, still in beta seems to already be fully functional and ready for an audience (even you dial-up guys)."

Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this any different from the normal Bittorrent clients? Simply more user-friendly, and easier to setup trackers and such?

Quick guess..

[SirFozzie]

I would guess that the TV networks would try to stomp this and hard.

Why?

Protection of an already diluted market.

Over the last 10 years, they've been hammered by Cable, Sattelite TV, and now BitTorrent. Appointment TV is dying.

Now comes another technology designed to possibly make it so you can watch any show at any time. The more who watch, the more who are able to watch.

The TV Networks SHOULD be the ones leading this charge.

But they won't, because they can't imagine anything outside of the current "Must See TV" trap that's locked them in over the past decades.

Bittorrent like?

[stratjakt]

Is this the protocol posted on /. a few weeks ago, that was like bittorrent, but let you transfer thing sequentially, so you could watch/seek in movies as they're transferring?

As for revolutionizing the world, I think TFA is getting ahead of itself. I don't care about Jimbo Q Nobody's online diary (I don't use the b word because it sounds retarded), and I can safely say I don't care to listen to his CD collection.

Too bad copyright law WRT radio and television broadcasts is such a mess. How cool would it be if every online TiVo was/had a P2P client? Forgot to tape Simpsons? Download it from the tivo-net.

Oh well, fuckit. Peercasting is DOA, there's no worthwhile content.

Re:Hmm.

[stupidfoo]

Because this is designed to allow you to listen to the music that someone else is broadcasting and then help them broadcast as well. The idea here is not to simply download copyrighted material. Think of it as Peer to Peer Shoutcasting, I guess. This solution seems to slightly more legal (although it is probably still illegal, at least in the US) than standard bittorrent.

Re:YAMP?

[m50d]

This is something genuinely different. If, and it's a big if, they have actually got it working, it will be for media streaming what bittorrent was for file downloading. You wouldn't call BT "yet another download accelerator", would you?

Media BLOGs?

[TheLoneCabbage]

While I'm sure everyone is ready to scream "it's the age of the one man TV Station!", we may not be entirely there just yet.

Media distribution is a technological problem, and there for inenvitably solvable.

But content is not. It still takes Talent, Money and Training (or 2 of the 3:) to produce content on the level that people expect. You can look to modern day BLOGs as a paradime. Everybody and his brother has a BLOG, but how many of them have regular readers? Only a few people have the tallent to write anything that the rest of us care to read.

The situation is made worse with a peercast network because:
1) you need the tallent
2) You need a host of OTHER people with tallent (say actors)
3) You need people to watch it. Lot's of people, a traditional BLOG doesn't require ramp up, to scale. But you need a following to get a following. Chicken and the egg.

Until problems like "Bad Actors" get solved it may be some time before peercasts acomplish anything more than syndicating otherpeoples (read comercial/stolen/porn) media.

It will be ready for primetime...

[Anonymous Coward]

...when they have compelling content. Its all about the content, nothing about technology.

Re:Hmm.

[Ironsides]

There is nothing inherently illegal about this. And it is not illegal in the US. In fact, I can imagine some radio stations and companies using this. In the case of companies, the otherday I listened (with slides) to a scheduled live webcast that was probably viewed by a couple thousand other people. If the company could set up a client that would let the viewers watch the webcast and help upload at the same time it would significantly reduce their bandwidth expenses. There are some companies that are going to love this technology if they can implement it and have it work.

Nasa streams NASA TV over the internet too. They could use this to reduce their costs as well.

One less barrier

[spud603]

You're right. Content is more than just a technological challenge. As you said, "it still takes Talent, Money and Training (or 2 of the 3:)".

But you can think of P2P broadcasting as a way of eliminating, or at least minimizing, the "money" requirement. It has the potential to lower (though probably not destroy) the barriers to entry into the media.

Your point about blogs is a good one. 90% of them are really not worth reading, and most of the rest are just barely interesting. But the .01% that are really extraordinary only came about because there is almost no barrier to entry. "Everybody and his brother" can get a blog. Those truly extraordinary bloggers would probably never have been heard if it weren't for that fact.

So my point is that while talent and training still take money (as demonstrated with the usually horrible graphics in open-source games), any way to ease the difficulty of producing and distributing media will allow that many more unforeseen and creative bits of content get through. Even if only a few quality streams come out of this technology, it will be a few more than we have right now.

Well, if multicasting was actually rolled out...

[Abcd1234]

The whole *point* of IP multicasting is to allow the network to perform data replication, etc, so that an individual can send data to n receivers without having to transmit n copies of the stream. Too bad, much like IPv6, no one seems to want to support it.

Re:Bittorrent like?

[krbvroc1]

From the point of view of the publisher the problem is that what is going to stop you from taking the shows you paid for and re-distribute them in another medium (edonkey, bittorrent,e tc)?

Nothing. But by offering the majority of folks this option the paying users are enough to write off the 'losses'. There will always be cheats and no system will protect against that. The best method in my opinion is to offer an affordable unencumbered way of doing this. They can embrace the new environment we are in or they can perish.

Multicast = bandwidth solution

[tji]

This sounds like an interesting use of P2P networking. But, it makes your broadcast very non-deterministic. Listeners will get a decent experience iff several factors are correct.

Multicasting would be a much better solution for IP broadcasting, and it has been around for a long time. But, it has never really hit prime time. With multicasting, you need only enough bandwidth for your stream. It is passed through the internet as needed - as users connect to the broadcast & subscribe to the multicast stream, the data is mirrored onto the necessary links. But, any link should have a maximum of one instance of the stream.

In theory multicasting sounds great, and there have been some very interesting implementations, particularly on Internet2. But, it never seems to hit critical mass.

Re:Media BLOGs?

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

It's silly to expect this to replace what we now come to know and expect from Television broadcasting (except through piracy), but I don't think that's the point. The web hasn't replaced books, and blogs haven't replaced the newspaper. But the web and blogs are still very interesting things that have developed content more suited to their specific strengths.

I don't expect to see nightly news webcasts equivalent to television news, but I expect to see live video broadcasts from protests and other mass events--with blogs rebroadcasting interesting highlights from those.

I don't expect to see the equivalent of Super Law and Order: Super Turbo Extreme broadcast from a bunch of kids on the internet, but I expect to see a lot of short skits and experimental film videos appealing to audiences too limited for broadcast television. The new universal law of content is that stuff that's meant to appeal to everyone will actually appeal to fewer and fewer people as time goes on.

I also expect that reality television will soon be watched only by people too old to understand the internet--expecially since reality shows are missing at least two of the requirements for content you list, if not all three.

Indeed, the reality shows only exist because the TV networks are ALREADY losing viewers, and they can't afford to pay actors and writers anymore. You don't have to duplicate something in order to replace it--TV is already losing viewers to the internet, to video games, and to the vast recorded library of all already existing television and movies (whether by DVD or bittorrent), so streaming video on the internet is just one more thing for people to do that doesn't involve watching broadcast television.

Re:Media BLOGs?

[Spy Hunter]

Maybe peercasting will be used for something other than traditional content with actors. For example, people who take interesting video of newsworthy events with their camcorders or phones or whatever will be able to broadcast it themselves, hopefully without fear of getting Slashdotted to death.

Re:Video on Demand

[Anonymous Writer]

You're not producing any TV shows with actors, sets, or sufficiently large budgets any time soon, are you?

The popularity of "reality TV" could cross over into peercasting. The major media outlet business model for that genre could be affected.

Re:Video on Demand

[madfgurtbn]

You're not producing any TV shows with actors, sets, or sufficiently large budgets any time soon, are you?

There's a movie called Tarnation that could win an Oscar this year. It was made for something like $200 on a Mac.

The cost of producing high quality content has dropped to an infinitesimal fraction of what it was only a decade ago.

The cost of disseminating high quality content world-wide, with peer-casting type technology like this, has now taken yet another enormous drop in cost.

Let's say some highly newsworthy event occurs in my backyard. I could hook up a camera to my computer and with my $40/month DSL connection, I could broadcast it live to millions of users.

Re:legal issues?

[starrsoft]

So if I do this, will the FCC come knocking on my door?

In a word: No.

If you have a talk-show type program (who'd wanna listen to that? =) Seriously though, I know that some widely read bloggers would have an audience) it would obviously be totally and unarguably legal. If you played music, you're fine as long as you pay the royalty to the artist (7.1 cents per song per play) same as any other internet or AM/FM/XM radio station.

Now traditional radio stations have already tried challenging the 'net radios' rights to broadcast, and have tried to impose unworkable fees through lobbying and legislation. I would not be a bit surprised if they continue to try this. So if you would do something like this, keep up with the laws (I'm sure /. will carry it if/when this happens) that govern royalties for radios' playing of copyright materials.

Re:Good, Free, Content

[WorkerGnome]

Speaking as a professional filmmaker and closet nerd, the content does exist. The independent film community is strong, and there are hundreds of little shorts made every year. They're obviously not up to network gloss levels, but many of them are interesting and thought-provoking. The big problem is that the people making movies are not the people writing the software to distribute the movies. They don't understand network protocols any more than the average programmer understands skip bleach processing.
The other problem is a lack of editorial effort. if everyone with a webcam dumps their 2-hour video of their baby failing to walk on the internet, how does one determine what is worth watching and what is content with only limited, personal relevance? It is the blog phenomenon, only with huge download times.
What is needed, in my estimation, is a technologically-savvy person with an interest in films who vets the films and posts links and reviews of content. Sort of halfway between Roger Ebert and suprnova.org.