


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?"
Where I live (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where I live (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Where I live (Score:2)
Yes.
Debatable.
Re:Where I live (Score:4, Funny)
Bite your tounge young man...
Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot is looking to become the next media giant
I, for one, welcome our new Slashdot overlords?
SlashdotTV? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:SlashdotTV? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:SlashdotTV? (Score:5, Funny)
The directors of the firm hired to
continue the credits after the other
people had been sacked, wish it to
be known that they have just been
sacked.
The credits have been completed
in an entirely different style at great
expense and at the last minute.
Re:SlashdotTV? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:SlashdotTV? (Score:2, Funny)
Content (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Content (Score:2, Funny)
I don't know, it depends on what you are doing in them...and more importantly who your doing it with.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Content (Score:2)
What I think is really missing is the set-top box. I had this idea of using a modded Xbox running Linux -- cheap, simple mod, easily obtained with built-in HDTV support -- as the set-top box. Never got around to implementing it though, because of bandwidth issues -- th
Good Content Idea (Score:4, Interesting)
If someone (PBS?) could release all of their educational content under a non-restrictive license then I'd happily pay for the dedicated servers to host and track the torrents. Math, History and Science programs would get even the adults involved but would be a great resource for people who are home-schooling or parents who want to keep their children occupied when home sick from school.
I don't know why we, Americans, have not done this already. I suspect that bandwidth is an issue but that is somewhat silly as it is otherwise wasted on illegal downloads and that sort of thing.
There should be a public education page that acts as an entry point for materials for students and teachers alike. Think "cable in the classroom" turned into "internet in the classroom". Why haven't a few public school teachers already gotten together and made this a reality? 30 minute shows aren't that hard to make. Take your lesson plan and turn that into a script. Read it, or hire someone to and viola.
Well, i did this. RSS + Bittorrent (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well, i did this. RSS + Bittorrent (Score:2)
wait till the whole show is download.
Bah, bring back multimedia through multicasting...
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... ;)
Re:upstream quota (Score:2, Informative)
its the little guys that care the most about it, and cable companies, id assume because the badwidth is shared between users of a segment as apposed to dsl.
i was actually told by a guy who worked at dsl.ca that they only had that cap in there as a catch all to kill peoples accounts that they didnt like. i regularaly download ~50
Re:upstream quota (Score:2)
Re:upstream quota (Score:2)
Back to the topic, why not just use something like newsgroups/usenet? Everything is cached locally on the ISP so they dont have to pay for out of network bandwidth. Everybody wins. Compared to Usenet, BT is downright wastefull.
Re:upstream quota (Score:2)
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.
Re:How do you advertise? (Score:3, Insightful)
No No fundage necessary (Score:3, Interesting)
A friend and I produce a little 1/2 hour news talk show which we broadcast on local cable channel three. Now we are looking to get it on our local pbs station. costs are negligable. My friend who is a tech freak has the latest G5 with a DV card and a high end Sony Cam (about $5000 in hardware). Studio time is free based on cable regulations. (if your not aware FCC requires cable operators to provide free service and equipment to local users.) for us this included a studio with 3 mounted cameras, an editing
Re:No No fundage necessary (Score:2, Informative)
Here in australia we don't have access to cable the same way you do in the states. As far as I am aware there is no legislation saying our local cable companies have to provide public access
Re:How do you advertise? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:How do you advertise? (Score:2)
2) ???
They are doing it... illegally (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They are doing it... illegally (Score:2, Funny)
2. ???
3. Profit!
In light of recent news, step 2 is "sue your customers."
Re:They are doing it... illegally (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this possible with BT considering that it sends out blocks in a non-sequential order and the .torrent file contains SHA-1 hashes of the blocks? eDonkey sends out blocks in random order, as well, in order to optimize against the rare missing block problem. I think this is a good optimization to take, especially on file distribution networks, but it sacrifices the ability to stream (as far as I know). Anyone know any more about this?
Still too hard for the average user (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but what kind of splash? (Score:2)
Fine, but a lot of people actually like the non-streamlined, one file at a time nature of BT. The core ideas of bittorent seed/peers have been implemented by other programs for a while. Ares uses incomplete files, and does a pretty good job at transfers too.
What separates BT from the rest is the nature of the transmission. BT bases transfers in a single file, and that file is ju
Re:Still too hard for the average user (Score:2)
You mean like Suprnova.org? Lots of bittorrent links embedded in a webpage. I don't understand, how is that harder to use than Kazaa? You just have to know where to go - it's less accessible than Kazaa, yes, but that's a GOOD thing. As soon as things become too centralized and accessible (i.e. widely known) they become a large, easy target. Re
um they already are doing it (Score:5, Informative)
isn't this EXACTLY what suprnova [suprnova.org] is doing?
sure its mostly an illigal "network" but it still substitutes for TV and pushes a hell of a lot of content across it.
Re:um they already are doing it (Score:3)
Re:um they already are doing it (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:um they already are doing it (Score:2, Informative)
at the end of the show post a link to a forum youve set up so people can comment on it?
doesnt seem to hard too me
Re:um they already are doing it (Score:2)
What happens when someone truncates your file name and continues to serve your content? What happens if someone changes your content and serves it under your file name?
Unless you control the flow of your video, how can you truly account for its effectiveness? A lot of
Re:um they already are doing it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:um they already are doing it (Score:3, Interesting)
My first question was, 'why'? (Score:5, Interesting)
From the standpoint of news broadcasting, this could be really big, though. Set up a
Trusted distributors? (Score:2)
Re:My first question was, 'why'? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:My first question was, 'why'? (Score:2)
Re:My first question was, 'why'? (Score:2)
Chances are, there are only a few people within range of the public access TV station that care about his theories. Over the whole world though, there may be enough to warrant him having a show.
mass tv over p2p? (Score:2, Insightful)
OPENSOURCE, TO THE RESCUE! (Score:2)
Re:mass tv over p2p? (Score:2)
But in almost 2 years of reviewing the more popular BT forums and websites, I can only recall reading of two infected downloads. And there was no suggestion that either were intended as malicious attacks.
Both the torrents were removed from their servers with hours.
The Real Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
M
Re:The Real Problem (Score:2)
Re:The Real Problem (Score:2)
Re:The Real Problem (Score:2)
The real problem with this idea is ubiquity of signal. Anyone can post anything they want, even if broadcasters closed off a single p2p service just their programs there would always be competing services. Pr0n, wicked graphic hunting shows, and real-life stuff would dominate the bandwidth, things we may want to keep our kids away from.
If the p2p part is the distribution and not the access, like bittorrent is currently, then it's identical to current web pages and such in terms of access.
What they're
Re:The Real Problem (Score:2)
Seeing goatse hasn't turned you/your kids into hardcore gay anal sex fetishists, has it? Spend a few minutes on rotten.com and see if you become desensitized. Are you lusting after festering corpses all of a sudden?
Your kids can go outside... and then they might run off to the big city and become crack whores. You better lock them inside and never let them out!
I like the
P2P (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:P2P (Score:2)
Re:P2P (Score:2)
I suppose you also blame samba for the files you share on a lan?
Re:P2P (Score:2)
One little problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a problem. (Score:2)
I suppose if you watch more than an hour of TV a night then it's a problem. But for me I have limited number of shows I'll watch. Netflix fills in the movie needs, but I'm giving serious consideration to stopping that as well.
Re:One little problem... (Score:2)
Re:One little problem... (Score:2)
My computer couldn't do anything else while it was doing that, unfortunately.
Waiting too long for a show (Score:5, Insightful)
But when most everyone gets broadband,... (Score:2)
Look at the broadband connections being offered in Korea, or many parts of Europe. Imagine how you could put a really fat pipe to work, if most everyone has one.
Re:Waiting too long for a show (Score:2)
Maybe your incoming BT ports are firewalled? BitTorrent can work on a firewalled connection, but it works much faster when you can accept incoming connections from other clients (on ports 6881-6889, depending on client).
Anyway, for reasons pointed by others, BT can't be used for streaming, a different p2p protocol would have to be written for that. And even then, you
Re:Waiting too long for a show (Score:2)
ESPN's Motion was supposed to become open source, but there was no way that Disney is going to let that happen.
Re:Waiting too long for a show (Score:2, Informative)
(Note: I haven't RTFA'd so I don't know how releveant streaming is to
P2P Radio already does it (Score:5, Informative)
P2P Radio [sourceforge.net] is the way to go. It can stream audio and video using peers. There are some p2p radio stations out there and TV stations are not far behind.
Peercast already does P2P video. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've had a go with it and its not too shabby.
With clients for Mac, Linux and Windows, availability is good. Unfortunately, Peercast doesn't advertise themselves too well which means there aren't so many video streams available yet (typically 5-15 video streams and 100 or so Audio streams.)
Reality Bittorrent TV? (Score:3, Funny)
Torrentocracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Multicast (Score:3, Interesting)
Pesce a good speaker - knows his material. (Score:4, Interesting)
I attended this talk at the National Student Media Conference last weekend, ( for any other attendees, I was the NSMC volunteer managing the digital projectors... ) and it was interesting to see the ideas mooted here percolating out into the other panels that took place over the rest of the conference. I think the independant media needs to continue to forge closer ties with the tech community to allow things like this to come to fruition.
One thing that didn't get brought up was whether this will compete with or complement Indymedia's upcoming IVDN video distribution framework. I was hoping to chase Mark up on this after the conference, but lost his email address - thanks submitter!
YLFIP.S., Mark, if you're reading this, I crashed in your suite on Sunday night - thanks for the keys. :-P
What's stopping it? (Score:2)
Firewalls
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.)
Re:Bittorrent is not the right way to do this (Score:2)
I don't understand the objection to using bittorrent. Why must distribution be broadcast and realtime instead of multicast and/or buffered? Doing the latter eliminates arguments about I-frames and maintaining real-time frame speeds. And it's what's happening right now at bittorrent/suprnova, with what seems to me a
Re:Bittorrent is not the right way to do this (Score:2)
Anyone know of an open source client/server architecture that will allow for content to be cached on the user's hard drive on a subscription basis? ESPNs was supposed to be open source, but it looks like they held off (not that I hold it against them) and A&E use a third party compa
Re:Bittorrent is not the right way to do this (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, and then again, no. (Score:3, Interesting)
Firstly, it can only make educated guesses at the available bandwidth of the nodes. Nodes will lie/cheat/steal in order to get more packets, and you can't trust the clients. They're greedy.
Secondly, it doesn't really know the network topology. Again, you're only able to make educated guesses. If my neighbor and me are on the same torrent, then ideally the t
Re:Bittorrent is not the right way to do this (Score:2)
But try and fit it in the hole... cough, in your wall.
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
Re:Bittorrent is not the right way to do this (Score:2)
Ogg Vorbis is nice, that's exactly what I was referring to about a self-rate-limiting stream. But again, that doesn't help BitTorrent because BitTorrent doesn't slice up its data that way.
Freenet already has this, more or less. (Score:5, Informative)
The idea of streaming across Freenet's infrastructure has been done before [mail-archive.com]. Who needs a grassroots TV network when you can have a grassroots, anonymous, encrypted TV network?
The other side-effect of Freenet's architecture is that popular data persists. You might be able to retrieve a show from days or weeks ago, if enough nodes watched it in the first place.
For the moment, performance limits it to audio streams, but video might be workable in the near future. The dev team can always use more bright minds. Are you free?
I'd like to see a NPR/PBS style approach (Score:4, Insightful)
This will only work for certain kinds of content (Score:2)
Now show me how you'd make "Farscape" or "The Practice" or "Survivor" with this kind of distribution model, where the very nature of the model (the content is available bec
Re:This will only work for certain kinds of conten (Score:2)
Re:This will only work for certain kinds of conten (Score:2)
I think you would have to distribute your content for free, and make up the costs through licensing of products and product placement.
what's "worse" about product placement? (Score:3)
Considering that most shows about entertainment are simply ADVERTISEMENTS for movies and music, why is it so unimaginable that they should support such programming? It's inevitable, even if the hotown suits won't yet concede this fact. What
Who's down for making a TV network (Score:2)
God spoke to me:
www.geocities.com/James_Sager_PA
Re:Who's down for making a TV network (Score:2)
Count me in.
BBC... (Score:4, Interesting)
Blogging is the news network of tomorrow. (Score:2, Interesting)
The obvious answer to my mind is bloggers.
Imagine getting your news not from CNN / Fox, but instead actually from someone on the ground living in an apartment in Baghdad while it's being bombed?
Get news reports on SCO vs Everyone not just from the media and court filings, but actually see image of the court building where it's all happening with bloggers telling us how they think the proceedings are goin
The AFTRS (Score:2, Insightful)
Simon.
Not a good idea (Score:2)
Yes you can use a h
Re:Not a good idea (Score:2)
To apply your metaphor to the actual situation being discussed here, not everyone can afford a hacksaw ( and the Federal Hacksaw Commission regulates who can and can't own one ) - but we already have the hammers.
Re:Not a good idea (Score:2)
Everybody downloads from everybody else. You're not using "your" internet connection, you're using an incredibly efficient set of internet peers to transmit to each other.
Actually its called Peer to Peer or P2P for short, and its not unique to bittorrent. If you're going to be condescending, at least don't equate a network topology to a product.
Interesting idea (Score:2)
Re:Interesting... (Score:2)
It wasn't. The reason is, you can broadcast anything you want, but nobody has to listen. Heck, if this took off, I could put up a network consisting entirely of looping footage of my own home videos. Nobody but my own family would tune in, and then but rarely. And because Bittorrent scales supply to meet demand, I'm not wasting much in the way of network resources in doing s
Re:bittorrent is so slow (Score:2)
Tim