Peercasting Ready for Primetime? 220
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? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:legal issues? (Score:2)
Yup. ASCAP (Score:4, Informative)
For a non-profit station they had a flat rate of something like $250/year. I suppose that's not that terrible, but since I wasn't making any money at all on the venture ~$20/month seemed a little steep to me. If you have any sort of revenue, they will charge you more based on your revenue.
If you want to do audio casting, I'd recommend Live365 instead. Because they volume license, the rates that you ultimately pay to ASCAP are lower than you'd end up paying on your own. One argument for using them, bandwidth considerations, seems to be fading, but it's definitely worth it just to avoid the legal hassle if your a hobbyist.
Re:Yup. ASCAP (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
It's harder than that. (Score:2)
If you do that, they can still go after the listeners.
Peercast software clones and retransmits the stream - so every listener is also making unlicensed copies in the process of forwarding. All they have to do is subscribe themselves, see where the packets are coming from, and go afte
Re:It's harder than that. (Score:2)
That is true, however the international jurisdiction differences may pose an advantage here. What about listening to an offshore source, from where licence fees do not apply?
The connection should not be a "hard" indication of infringement, doubtful enough to give even a not too good lawyer a good chance to find a way out.
Even without this, the listeners are more expendable than the producers.
Re:legal issues? (Score:2, Insightful)
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 radi
Mercora (Score:2, Informative)
-dk
Re:Mercora (Score:2)
I don't need more Windows only software becomming a "standard" on the internet.
Video on Demand (Score:3, Interesting)
If I were a major media executive I would be seriously worried about my businiess model.
Re:Video on Demand (Score:2)
Re:Video on Demand (Score:2)
Of course it will take time. I didn't say it will happen tomorrow, but it will certainly happen,don't you agree?
Re:Video on Demand (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:2)
Remember one of the first reality shows? Big Brother. The feed to the house was broadcast on the web 24/7, and it was a spectacular failure. Why? Because without flashy graphics, music, and (most of all) editing, life is boring!
Re:Video on Demand (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Video on Demand (Score:2)
Really? So writers, actors, and directors work practically for free now? No?
So it's only the high-tech video equipment and editing (software) that are significantly less expensive... They were not a significant cost of producing content in the first place, so even if they were free, they only amount to a tiny drop in the "cost of producing high quality content."
political reality shows could be popular (Score:2)
Don't you think there is a niche available for some sort of politics-oriented show that looks at all that from a different perspective?
I myself am working on a public-domain (copylefted) political documentary which I hope to distribute via p2p.
Once I get a peercasting station to distribute my documentary, I hope that it will be passed on via oth
Re:political reality shows could be popular (Score:2)
Quick guess.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Quick guess.. (Score:4, Informative)
During the day, you've got soaps, kids programming, and infomercials. What if you could simultaneously offer content for everyone else (not that I couldn't spend my days watching Days of Our Lives and Dora the Explorer, but I choose not to)? Or always having educational programs for schools available?
I'd love the ability to pull up my favorite show (which I missed because I was [on the road|working|watching something else|whatever]) at anytime. Without needing a PVR and without worrying about some broadcast flag...
Re:Quick guess.. (Score:2)
Cable and satellite providers carry local stations. Cable is essentially an extension of broadcast TV with additional channels. Satellite carries local stations but with restrictions due to location, etc.
Local TV stations make their money from the local news. Almost all of a station's staff works in the news department or works to support them. The news departme
Re:Quick guess.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Also oversubscribed ISPs. (Score:2)
Part of the problem is that both the backbone and the ISPs are only delivering "best effort" Quality of Service (QoS) to their clients. This makes for dropped packets, which means either holes in the stream or retransmissions and stuttering. In a peercast environment such interruptions add up with every ho
Re:Also oversubscribed ISPs. (Score:2)
Re:Also oversubscribed ISPs. (Score:2)
If they don't the local ISPs might go around them with M-bone like tunneling. The backbones bill the little guys by connection size, so they might fight at first.
I think what we need is:
- Software features from the equipment manufacturers so the local ISPs (which sometimes ARE backbone providers too) can do it easily once they chose to.
-
This is not "any show any time" (Score:3, Informative)
Peercast only allows you to watch what is being shown on any given channel as it is broadcast, much like regular broadcast TV.
The content shown is dictated by the operator of that channel.
Re:Quick guess.. (Score:2)
The owners of the broadcast TV networks don't fear cable and satellite programming, because they own those content networks too (and in some cases, the delivery infrastructure as well). General Electric, for example, doesn't just own NBC; they also own CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, Mun2TV, SciFi, Trio, USA, and many Telemundo stations.
These companies SHOULD have pioneered the way in Internet video delivery, but they didn't, and there's a couple of r
Re:Quick guess.. (Score:2)
This is something I've always wondered. How effective IS a broadcast commercial? I personally can't really think offhand whenever I've ever seen a commercial, and it caused me to go buy that product. I'm sure it may have happened with something new...but, no commercial for c
Re:Quick guess.. (Score:2)
Perhaps this laundry detergant isnt the best example, since its a reoccouring purchase for most people. However, for any product that you dont have previous expe
Bittorrent like? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Bittorrent like? (Score:2)
And this, of course, would be a logical thing for the media companies to support. Pay $15-$20 a month and we get to pick and choose the shows we want to download. And, since we're spreading the files using our own bandwidth, there's little cost to the media companies.
I'd love to be legal, if the media companies would just give me what I want.
Re:Bittorrent like? (Score:2)
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)?
What could they do? Some form of DRM? That's not s
Re:Bittorrent like? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Bittorrent like? (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, the choice is very limited, but it will grow up I'm sure of it!
Re:Bittorrent like? (Score:2)
Re:Bittorrent like? (Score:2)
Well if they can work out the details it could have some worth while contents.
Think college radio station. But maybe with music videos thrown in. Any highshchool or college could have there one PBS style station with out having to spend huge amounts on a transmiter. That small college without any type of TV deal could also broadcast their sports events.
Re:Bittorrent like? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Bittorrent like? (Score:2)
Ready for primetime? (Score:2, Funny)
Every "station" has 0 listeners and 0 relayers, save two or three japanese ones.
Yeah, sound's like the next big thing for bloggers. Another way to "express yourself" without anyone ever seeing or hearing.
Re:Ready for primetime? (Score:2)
A niche for parasites (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:A niche for parasites (Score:5, Informative)
As I understand it, BitTorrent (and by extension, IceCase which is layered on top of BitTorrent) solves this problem at the peer level using a tit-for-tat algorithm: people who aren't uploading packets don't get many download packets either. This seems like a much more robust solution than "blessed binaries" (which will be hacked anyway, and prevent people from developing their own clients)
Re:A niche for parasites (Score:2)
Re:A niche for parasites (Score:2)
My assumption is that a saturated uplink is stopping those ACKs from getting through. Though, I have the problem even after prioritizing ACKs on my router.
Re:A niche for parasites (Score:2)
I haven't managed to find the right knobs to prioritise ACKs, but I've seen QoS HOWTOs that talks about exactly this problem.
If I limit my upload bandwidth to ~5kbps (on a 64k uplink, max upload is ~6kbps) then it all flies. Let it go up to 6kbps and downloads choke.
Re:A niche for parasites (Score:2)
BitTorrent's anti-leeching works well enough for static files, but can't work for live streams.
With a file, every node grabs a different (random) part of the file, and then shares that with anyone that needes it. That way, everyone has something someone else needs, and when they start downloading a piece from you, you start downloading a different piece (that you don't already have) from them. This won't work with streams, as nobody is g
Re:A niche for parasites (Score:2)
For this reason, P2P can never work the way the evangelizers claim. Making it worse is the fact that many users are limited to 128Kbps or 256Kbps upload, meaning they can't download faster than that (without becom
Not only for streams (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not only for streams (Score:2)
There's always localised caching, usenet style, but I'm not convinced that this would work well for web pages which are updated on a frequent basis.
Internet bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Media BLOGs? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
One less barrier (Score:2, Insightful)
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 e
Re:Media BLOGs? (Score:2)
Re:Media BLOGs? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ev
Re:Media BLOGs? (Score:2)
I don't know. That could be hilarious, maybe even intentionally so.
Re:Media BLOGs? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Media BLOGs? (Score:2)
Asymetric Links? (Score:2)
It will be ready for primetime... (Score:2, Insightful)
peercast for macworld... (Score:2)
Honestly, I don't think someone is going to go to macworld simply because they can't see a live stream of the keynote, so I don't believe the argument that they got rid of streaming to increase attendance...
slashdotted (Score:3, Funny)
Good, Free, Content (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Good, Free, Content (Score:3, Informative)
It's not from Hollywood, so you won't see it on Entertainment Tonight or the E! Channel, and it won't be picked up by your local Fox affiliate, but it's out there on the 'net.
Every year thousands of film students graduate, and they create plenty of good indy films, full length and shorts. They're generally mocked by the public at large as artsy-fartsy nonsense, but there are plenty of good ones.
The Blair Witch project is a good example of a student proje
Re:Good, Free, Content (Score:2, Informative)
Sluggy Freelance [sluggy.com]
Megatokyo [megatokyo.com]
PvP online [pvponline.com]
8-bit theater [nuklearpower.com]
Red vs. Blue [redvsblue.com]
A lot of content is produced that way. Some of it even good one. Just beacause it's not video doesn't mean it doesn't count.
And let's face it, most of us would rather read a comic with a pile of crap fighting psycho-bears [schlockmercenary.com] than see some bald guy [schlockmercenary.com] parading in front of a camerafor half an hour, no matter what he actually did.
Re:Good, Free, Content (Score:2)
Re:Good, Free, Content (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good, Free, Content (Score:2)
Actually, quite a bit of content is produced that way... And, like Open Source programs, 99% of them were made in an hour or two, and are very, very simple.
Just as there's relatively few open source projects that approach the size and complexity of expensive commercial programs, there are also very few free media projects that produce something rivaling commercial media.
Television is dead... (Score:2)
Streamdist (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Streamdist (Score:2)
Re:Streamdist (Score:2)
That said, latency does accumulate with streamdist. I did not consider this a problem, so I did nothing to prevent it. The idea is that everyone gets the data, not that they all get it exactly at the same time.
Great - another reason for the *AA to hate P2P (Score:3, Informative)
Y'know, they're pretty picky about net broadcast fees [usatoday.com]. Exactly how are they going to bill people? And exactly who will be billed?
I'm all for this, don't get me wrong. But like any good idea that promotes the *AA's products, moron music execs will be all over it since it bypasses one of their revenue models.
Enjoy it for now, because it's probably going away soon.
Re:Great - another reason for the *AA to hate P2P (Score:2)
Unless content producers who aren't affiliated with the MPAA or RIAA start using it.
I'm thinking of my son fresh out of film school. It's an ideal way for him to put his portfolio up on the net without getting hammered by bandwidth charges. He's made some awfully funny movies that very few folks would get to see if he relied on normal distribution methods.
Re:Great - another reason for the *AA to hate P2P (Score:2)
Well, that's always the matador's cape that gets displayed every time a P2P app shows up on the radar. "It makes a handy way to distribute and promote non-*AA media." But realistically, and I'm sure most people would agree - the lion's share of bandwidth in all P2P is copyrighted.
And that's why the music mafia are gunning for P2P. And if some legitimate users get stomped on...well then it's tough luck. The fact that they're producing a competing product is, of course, a complete accident. ;^)
Re:Great - another reason for the *AA to hate P2P (Score:2)
From what I read...looks like you can broadcast pretty much anonymously...no one knows who is broadcasting vs those that are only acting as clients...
So, if you wanted to run a pirate station, it should be pretty difficult for them to tell 'who' to bill.....
Practical use (Score:2)
Is this patented? (Score:2)
Amateur Pr0n (Score:2, Interesting)
Let the ("heh, heh, heh") games begin!
Well, if multicasting was actually rolled out... (Score:4, Insightful)
Multicast = bandwidth solution (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Multicast = bandwidth solution (Score:2)
So much for PeerCast... (Score:2, Informative)
FAQ:
So much for PeerCast...
No adware or spyware? How can I verify this? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is one way people acquire backdoors, spyware, adware, and all the other software people don't want.
Re:No adware or spyware? How can I verify this? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.peercast.org/code/
Re:No adware or spyware? How can I verify this? (Score:2)
Thanks, what I saw at the download page [peercast.org] was just a binary for my OS and some documentation. I must have missed the link to download source code under a free software license.
OurMedia.org (Score:2)
Have a look! [ourmedia.org] We're announcing the opening at VloggerCon [blogspot.com] in NYC.
P2P plus TiVO = The Future (Score:2)
Everyone's tearing this thing to shreds based upon this embryonic release. The point is, the vision is absolutely on target.
TiVO is very, very close to being a killer app. So you take TiVO and turn it in to an opensourced downloadable PC based app, and then add P2P streaming and theoretically you've got infinite on-demand programming. Am I the only one that thinks that would rule?
Granted there are some enormous technical problems (not the least of which are upload bandwidth, bitrate issues, and MPAA /
TV is dead (Score:2)
Re:Hmm. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hmm. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmm. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmm. (Score:2)
I can imagine ALL radio stations and tv networks using this!
Peercasting could be a very big deal. No need for Akamai scale server farm and associated bandwidth to broadcast live content worldwide. That brings the cost of hosting even a hugely popular webcast close to zero.
And that goes not just for the major companies, it works for you and me, too. Anyone can broadcast live content to millions around the world, (in the unlikely event t
Re:Hmm. (Score:2)
Re:Hmm. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Hmm. (Score:2)
Re:You are a Moron (Score:2)
Did you even read my whole post? Or did you just read the last three of four words? Did you read the post I was responding to, or did you decide that it would work to just jump into the middle of the conversation?
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 materi
Re:YAMP? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:YAMP? (it's about using what you've got) (Score:3, Interesting)
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" approa
Re:Yes, but... (Score:2)
=)
- Tony