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)."

legal issues?

[tmilam]

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

Video on Demand

[madfgurtbn]

We're all t.v. networks now.

If I were a major media executive I would be seriously worried about my businiess model.

A niche for parasites

[Lonesome Squash]

At the moment these systems rely on the social contract to make sure they aren't abused by people who download without contributing upload bandwidth. This creates an opportunity for those who wish to push out content at little-to-no cost to simply turn their upload bandwidth to zero, or play games with firewalls to prevent uploads.

If the paradigm really pays off, the upload bandwidth for heavy users may become significant. The reward for defecting from the contract will increase. Remember that at one time no one would think of sponging off the Internet to mass mail a commercial message (Horrors!) and the first ones to do so were roundly excoriated.

The advantage here is that there may be valuable mitigating strategies (For example, blessed client binaries with authentication keys built in, with a checkbox to only upload to authorized clients is one possibility). The question in my mind is, will parasitism be an inconvenience(like email spam), a pain in the ass (like worms/trojans requiring active efforts to suppress), or virtually debilitating (as it is on Usenet)?

It will depend on a lot of factors, including the growth and shape of the torrent-style community (how many uploaders/downloaders/freeloaders), the cost of the upload streams for those that will end up having to pay for extra bandwidth, etc.

Not only for streams

[art6217]

A community could also run sites like Slashdot with everybody sharing the bandwidth. That might mean no ads, no dependency on a single corporation, everybody can participate in selecting stories, setting "locality" - browsing stories scored by an interest group a reader belongs to, by a group close geographically, or with the score averaged globally.

Internet bandwidth

[asliarun]

I'm curious to know how "peercasting" and peer-to-peer softwares change the network bandwidth usage for a country or across geos.

Currently, even though the internet is supposed to be a decentralized network, it's still built with old network usage patterns in mind. Bandwidth is allocated accordingly as well.

I think that along with P2P network usage, wireless usage (WiMax, for example) will also change the bandwidth usage pattern.

Although i'm not a network designer by any means, i would still be very interested to know how the network designs of the future would look like, and the kinds of bottlenecks one would face in the future, if still connected to the older networks.

Good, Free, Content

[Thunderstruck]

Software like this raises an interesting question, where is the talent?

I'm running Firefox, a free browser created from donated talent on the internet,(and occasionally funded & used as a testing ground for new stuff by corporations.)

I read my email with Thunderbird, a free client created from donated talent on the internet,(and occasionally funded & used as a testing ground for new stuff by corporations.)

I write documents with OpenOffice.org, a free office sutie created from donated talent on the internet (and occasionally funded & used as a testing ground for new stuff by corporations.)

Why is there so little entertainment produced this way? There are people out there with free time and talent. There are media companies with spare cash who don't want to spend jillions hyping a sitcom with a theme that will flop. Or is it just a matter of time?

Streamdist

[RAMMS+EIN]

``"Have you ever wanted to run your own internet radio or TV station, but thought the bandwidth would cost too much?''

Yes. That's why I started to write streamdist [nyud.net]. One person starts serving a stream, then everyone who connects distributes it to the next person. I made it work for Ogg Vorbis files, but then I lost interest and moved on. I guess peercast is similar.

Re:YAMP? (it's about using what you've got)

[turnstyle]

"Winamp, windows media player, real audio/video, quicktime, divx, xvid, itunes, etc etc."

I don't know Peercast (which seems oriented toward "radio" type uses), but I can comment about my app, Andromeda [turnstyle.com].

Essentially, the question is: you've got your collection of files, now what?

As for Andromeda, it turns your collection into a browsable, streaming Web site (mostly used with MP3s, though you can use it with OGG, Real, etc.)

(You need a PHP or ASP capable Web server)

It's more of an "on-demand" approach (rather than "radio") -- you decide what you want to play. And since it's Web based, you don't have to bother toting physical stuff around or installing special client apps -- it all happens over the network (Internet or LAN).

When it comes to personal collections, those are generally kept to private use, but "sharable" works (ie, Creative Commons, or if you're the author) can be put on public sites.

In other words, it's not about YAMP, it's about what you do with what you've got.

Re:Bittorrent like?

[FunkyRat]

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

You know... You don't have to rely on the large media conglomerates for content. Almost anybody can learn to play music. Almost anybody can learn how to use a video camera and software to make TV shows or movies. You can too.

Wait... What's that I hear? You don't want to listen to the kids down the street who can barely play their instruments and their crappy garage band? You don't want to watch the fat guy across the way with the digicam and delusions of being an auteur? OK. Fine with me. You're free to enjoy Britney Spear's latest opus. Just don't declare everyone else's content as being not worthwhile just because you don't like it.

Oh, and if you want to hear some amateurs doing really terriffic radio then check out Transom [transom.org]. It is possible for non-mainstream media to produce "worthwhile" content.

Re:Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You're right that it's not illegal, but there could be contractual problems. IIRC, webcast licencing requires the radio stations pay per listener. If this allows the station to track users, then it's not a problem, but otherwise the licencing will need to be reworked.

Amateur Pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, one of the big potential uses for this is in the amateur ("I've got a webcam and will perform in front of it") sexual video arena. Though at the moment the software looks like it is probably aimed at single broadcast/multiple watchers, if it became a true peer-to-peer network it could be a Very Big Thing Indeed since it does not rely on a single entity (corporation) hosting a central (such as yahoo or webcamnow or camarades) server.

Let the ("heh, heh, heh") games begin!

Re:Yup. ASCAP

[Thomas Shaddack]

...but it's definitely worth it just to avoid the legal hassle if your a hobbyist.

This brings an interesting question: how to anonymize the stream source, the initial node. How to make impractically difficult to trace down the originator of the stream. Once this is solved, no more paperwork for hobbyists.

Bureaucracy is a form of terrorism.

Re:Good, Free, Content

[Anonymous Coward]

Get yourself down to a Film Festival or a Fringe Festival, or two. You'll see tons of stuff (and that's only stuff the festival had space for). Perhaps they're not free, but they're as close as you can get. At the Fringes, many of the actors barely manage to cover their travel costs. And I'm guessing a lot of these talents would be more than happy to share some of their work for free, if only they had a way to do it. If you work at some events (e.g. parades) you'll meet entertainers who actually lose money participating, it's their way of contributing to the community (and hoping to get discovered).

Also, keep in mind that software is a bit special: the authors can subsidize their work easily with high-paying day jobs, and software development can be done easily in chunks of a few hours here and there, using minimal equipment and support. Live and recorded shows are different, you need to rehearse and coordinate a bunch of people's schedule to do anything other than one-man shows (animation excepted).

No adware or spyware? How can I verify this?

[jbn-o]

On their download page, PeerCast claims that their program has "No adware/spyware". How can I verify this without complete source code to the program? If I learn that the claim is a lie, how can I change the program to do what I want without source code under a license that lets me modify it? If I want to distribute my improved version to help others, how can I do this without source code under a license that lets me distribute my derivative?

This is one way people acquire backdoors, spyware, adware, and all the other software people don't want.

Re:Quick guess..

[Spy Hunter]

They don't have to worry too much yet. I think the answer to the question posed in the article title is "No." The one station on peercast.org at this time with more than 20 listeners skips like crazy. Furthermore, I suspect that the upstream bandwidth of most listeners is not yet large enough to support decent video content, making peercasting TV infeasable. Certainly you're not going to get HDTV or even normal broadcast quality from this anytime soon.

However, I do have to commend the peercast.org folks for an exceptionally nice user experience for their software. It installs in a snap and works immediately with zero configuration, using my default media players even. That's a big step toward wide adoption. Now if only the the ISPs would stop being so stingy with upload bandwidth, so the concept actually had a chance of working...

Re:Hmm.

[Bloater]

I can't imagine anybody using this for long.

This is different from bittorrent for several reasons.

Streaming media requires data to arrive from the start to the end. bittorrent doesn't guarantee that the start arrives before the rest of the data. Actually bittorrent acts like it buffers for the duration of the stream - then the stream can play. This system sends the data in order so you only have to buffer for a short time - like any normal streaming protocol.

The second difference (as it appears from the documentation) is that this is just an icecast client and an icecast server rolled up together; basically a normal icecast relay but with a local display. Add in to that the ability to find relays using some sort of tracker and the clients can switch away from bad relays.

This is problematic if you end up having to keep hopping. What is needed is multiresolution codecs with low resolution data being sent by many peers (mirrored), and higher resolution data being interlaced among them (striped). That way you would be connected to several peers and a failure in any of them leaves the stream working at a slightly reduced quality until another peer can be connected. This doesn't necessarily mean using a multiresolution transform for audio and video, because the data is often separable into broad data and fine data anyway.

Re:Hmm.

[Rei]

If they can pull this off, I expect a *lot* of illegal stuff going on. Namely, say, the online broadcasting of complete cable/dish/local station lineups.

I currently would like to see a lot more torrenting of regular web content. I've been working a bit on scripts to try and make it easier to incorporate torrent-serving into web serving. As a server (I've just been using Apache), you turn on MultiViews and define inclusion criteria (say, you want users to be able to get torrents of .zip, .tgz, iso, .avi, etc files of greater than N bytes), and run the script; torrents are automatically created and served. As a client, should your browser be smart enough to list .torrent files in the ACCEPT header as desired more than the types of content being torrented, MultiView enabling will make the server pass back the torrent file instead of the actual file; if a browser is asking for a torrent, it undoubtedly has an application set up for mime type application/x-bittorrent (my default install of firefox already does, at the very least). As a consequence, if your browser is "torrent aware", you automatically get a torrent when available, and if it's not, the web server hands you the normal file instead.

An even better route (but more complex, and not something I'm willing to spend the time on currently) would be to set up (for both browsers and servers) an encoding type 'torrent' (i.e., just like you can have pages encoded with gzip and whatnot). This would allow you at the very least to serve individual files used for immediate display (like large pictures, flash, etc), and at best (but more complicated) serve entire an entire web page, as a single torrent. Naturally, dynamic content cannot be included in this, but the static parts of a dynamic page can.