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P2P Internet TV - Monday 23rd February 2004
Last year I wrote an essay on the BBC License fee, suggesting that Internet TV is the future of TV broadcasting, and that this will be fantastic for increasing freedom, reducing the stranglehold of an oligopoly of media companies and problems associated with them (such as censoring content, advertising ‘business-as-usual’ politics etc).
The issue stopping Internet TV catching on at the moment is the prohibitive cost of bandwidth to transmit a station. Do the maths: take a 160kbps stream. That’s 20KB/s, 1,200KB/minute, 72MB/hour, 1.7GB/day. And that’s just for one viewer. 100 concurrent viewers watching all day would require uploading 170GB/day, or 5,200GB/month. To get that with the hosting company which I use would cost ?17,000 per month. So not cheap. Only a rich philanthropist would be able to afford that without requiring extensive advertising to offset the costs.
If someone could develop a way to deliver Internet TV in a P2P way, that is sharing bandwidth between many clients rather than using a server/client architecture, then suddenly Internet TV can take off. Skype can do VoIP using peer-to-peer networks, and that works similarly - streaming bits of data in real-time. So surely similar technologies can be used for P2P Internet TV (discuss on Usenet)?
2 Responses to “P2P Internet TV”
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March 14th, 2004 at 12:57am
Peercast just released a new (beta) version which I’m currently testing. Looks good - trying with just audio now, but hope to move on to video soon (when I figure out how to get .nsv or some other format broadcasting working)
March 14th, 2004 at 11:44am
i’ve been listening to your v0.120 test stream and noticed some lag.
possibly a larger buffer would correct this?