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Peer-to-Peer Internet Television

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tue Jun 14, 2005 10:01 AM
from the step-in-the-right-direction dept.
Media The Internet
Lanaki writes "A non-profit based in Austin, TX is merging the free software and Copyleft communities through a new internet TV station: ACTLab TV. They are streaming Creative Commons, Copyleft, public domain content, and original videos using Alluvium software and their own media player. It's all open source, encouraging others to make their own audio and video streams. Their website was released this week and the player and demo stream will go public next week."
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  • neet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Amouth (879122) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @10:02AM (#12813113)
    sounds like a winner if they don't make it too mushed up.. but how are they going to make money to keep it alive.??

  • Live Video is becoming increasingly popular (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ProfaneBaby (821276) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @10:03AM (#12813120)
    Note the launch of Vobbo [vobbo.com] (live video blogs) as an example.

    Bandwidth is cheap. Disk space is cheap. Video is going to be very big, very soon.
    • I'd be interested to see if "video blogs" could take off.

      I'll start by admitting that I don't quite get blogs, even just the text ones. The signal to noise ratio is too low to interest me.

      That out of the way, I understand why some people like them: it's an alternative entertainment and news source. People read them at their desks, during work or during "surfing time" at home, when they're not watching TV.

      Podcast blogs get time you spend away from your computer: exercising, driving, on the bus, etc. Your
    • 4mbit down, 384kbps up... typical Comcast cable modem.
      1.5mbit down, 128-384kbps up.. typical SBC DSL line.

      *Downloading* a video blog might not be too much of a hassle, but *uploading* one is going to turn a lot of people off from it.

      Let's not forget all of the poor saps that are still on dialup. ;)

  • Big Whoop (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 14erCleaner (745600) <FourteenerCleaner@yahoo.com> on Tuesday June 14 2005, @10:03AM (#12813122) Homepage Journal
    Wow, it's like public-access cable TV, only world-wide. Whoopee.
    • Hey, some very good programming can be found on cable-access. Many old horror shows came out of local broadcast, and when those channels had to go to networks, the cable access took over. MST3k got its start on local access, and anyone over 40 can remember the local shows featuring clowns showing cartoons on Saturday mornings, and personalities such as the Ghoul or Zacherly, which graced only local markets.
      • This indeed is the promising aspect of this -- good shows will get passed around the usual Internet ways (memepool, boingboing, /., etc.) and become "popular".

        Then, who knows? Maybe cable types will pick them out to be producers, or whatnot. It could be InternetTV:cable::blogs:news ; which is to say, not a replacement, but the best and brightest get cred and can make a living doing it.
    • I, for one, welcome this medium. Since I made my switch to DirecTV a few years ago the one thing I miss on cable was the public access stations, there is so much great content that can be found on PA stations.
    • What advantage does this have over regular public-access cable:
      • Your show is always on prime time, which probably doubles your audience
      • Your show is distributed all over the world, which probably increases the audience by an order of magnitude
      • Once the technology becomes mainstream, more people can watch stuff like this from work, which probably increases your audience by an order of magnitude.

      So, given the above information, and some usage statistics about public access television, we can conclude

    • Some friends of mine had a very long-running and fairly successful cable access show entitled, "Fusion Patrol," in Phoenix, that ran weekly for many seasons, and actually had a fairly decent following. They made fun of science fiction and mainstream TV shows and the personalities behind those shows, with a little of other stuff along with. They got cancelled when they made an episode parodying awards shows with, "The Limp Cable Awards", which got them banned by COX Cable due to the political incorrectness
    • The point of public access isn't necessarily in the quality of programs as perceived by the mass market public, but rather that it provides what could be construed as quality programming by a narrow niche of the populace. There is probably a public access television program out there for everyone, with the limiting factor being the availability of the resource to the producers of the content. This technology could possibly provide for a nearly unlimited television resource with little oversight. People c
    • Tom Green got his start doing a cable access show in Ottawa, Canada, which is about as small a market as you get. A friend of mine was a producer on the show for a year or two. The thing about that show was that it never stopped being a cable access show... it just moved from network to network, picking up a larger cable access-type audience as it went. If you can get one or two of those types of shows to a broader worldwide audience through this medium, I'm sure you could rival the ratings that Tom got

  • Heh (Score:5, Funny)

    by w.p.richardson (218394) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @10:04AM (#12813130) Homepage
    Internet Cable Access...

    Wayne's World! Party time! Excellent!

  • Epileptics beware! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Scrameustache (459504) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @10:04AM (#12813134) Homepage Journal


    Why do they feel the need to surround their text with agressivly flashing graphics?

    I couldn't get past the first paragraph before I'd had enough of this. Call me back when they offer a non-stroboscopic version of their content.

  • I'm glad (Score:3, Insightful)

    by aonaran (15651) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @10:07AM (#12813166) Homepage
    I was wondering when someone was going to try and organize Creative Commons stuff into a central TV station that people can go to.
    The name isn't very good. ACTLab doesn't feel like a name for a place to go for media... but that's ok.

    Good timing on the /. announcement. If there is no media or software to download yet they might not be slashdotted.
  • This reminds me of the dinky little community station we have around here that use and abuse public domain TV shows as much as they can. Except this one is digital. There is a lot of great content out there, as long as the people who made it don't want much money for it.

    The main problem here is the competition. There are a lot of other p2p places that don't charge a cent. They just happen to be illegal though.
  • guys start streaming copyrighted stuff via P2P streams? This technology may be shot down by the *.AAs as evil, because it could be used for piracy.

  • Bit Torrent TV (Score:4, Interesting)

    by StreetFire.net (850652) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @10:14AM (#12813257) Homepage
    I would love to see a player built on a Bit-Torrent type solution, but unfortunatly, Bit Torrnet has some limitations for on-demand streaming.

    BT doesn't have a "click/watch" type solution. BT is only good for asynchronous delivery of content due to it's download nature. That said, if a future version of BT provided for buffer-demanded priority queing, this would solve the problem. That is my "player" plugged into BT, would know that the next 30 seconds of content is Very high priority, the following 30 seconds is high priority, the next 30 seconds is low priority and the following 30 seconds is very low priority. This could evolve from an MPLS style label switching paradigm of some sort (in model only, not saying to use actual MPLS, rather some of the MPLS best Practices combined with BT).

    Just some thoughts.

    -Adam

    • Re:Bit Torrent TV (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Chyeld (713439) <chyeld AT newsguy DOT com> on Tuesday June 14 2005, @11:02AM (#12813899)
      And suddenly we have a world where people can only watch the first half of a show because all the seeds drop off once the show is finished and never upload the last 30 sec to anyone.

      No thanks, I'd rather have the current setup where the most rare piece is the highest priority and simply "Tivo" the shows.
    • That's a fantastic idea. It's even easily doable, it's just a change on the client, not the protocol really.
    • That is my "player" plugged into BT, would know that the next 30 seconds of content is Very high priority, the following 30 seconds is high priority, the next 30 seconds is low priority and the following 30 seconds is very low priority.

      That would be good, but another possibility would be a subscription model: tell BT what shows you are interested in, and it downloads the latest episodes whenever they become available... then the next day you come in to see what's on and everything is already on your har

      • Too many syllables. Call it "sweeming" instead. In fact, if it works we'll all be sweeming in a sea of video.
      • Interesting, though. They claim to be the originator of swarming technology and have a "strong intellectual property position" with regards to it, etc. etc. Bram Cohen might be able to dispute that, of course. Makes me wonder if they're just another Eolas.

  • Also see Broadcast Machine (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Wesley Felter (138342) <wesley@felter.org> on Tuesday June 14 2005, @10:16AM (#12813297) Homepage
    Broadcast Machine [participatoryculture.org] is a similar thing (which I'm sure has been mentioned on Slashdot before), but it's not live. I'm not really sure what the benefit of the live broadcast model is when the Internet can better support a video-on-demand model.
  • How long until the rest of you non-austiners get to watch some OBT productions? (Anyone familure with Austin's public access should have atleast seen some of his shows. Ol' Bitty was the most longing ran one that I remember, Currently doing Clown Time.

    Of course, the reason his shows are so good is they're uncensored un-prescreened call in with the random locals that are up at 1am. This will kind of take that community feel away.
  • I wonder what would happen if they managed to incorporate subscription fees or other pay models into the software?

    I'm thinking such a move would generate a humongous business opportunity for all involved.

  • Finally Slashdot Video can start (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Raindeer (104129) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @10:30AM (#12813467) Homepage Journal
    Snif, I still miss Slashdot Radio. But now, thanks to this technology we can get Slashdot video. We will be able to see Cowboyneal and CmdrTaco getting it on in one great geek lovefest on geek subjects.

    But really, Slashdot Radio was one of those "programs" a group of people worldwide listened too, just because it was there and it appealed to them. This kind of technology makes this possible for others as well. Sure you might not be interested in the Dutch Open Student competition rock climbing, but a couple of hundred people might. Peer to peer makes it possible to distribute footage without reducing your upstream to one bit/second/customer.

    BTW BBC makes use of Kontiki for their peer to peer distribution of their TV programs and I can see other public TV starting that as well. There is no other way you can easily let 1 million people download the 8 o'clock news beteween 20:10 and 00:10 without jamming your internet connection.

    Peer to peer is the holy grail of networking.
  • sub 384kbps upstream BW on USA 'broadband' service is blocking a huge opportunity for small scale P2P broadcasting. Heck, BW is so tight that decent quality stereo audio via distributed distribution is impractical nigh impossible...

    of course you won't be seeing any upstream broadband, even though it's technically possible and as cheap to add to docsis 2 systems as additional downstream. why? because it foils the 'we are in control of broadcasting' mindset of the providers.

    what we need is some rules simil
  • I read through this a bit and got to think that I was surprised that ABC, CBS, and NBC haven't already tried to do this (since they get their revenue from advertising, this would expand their advertising base)... so I decided to look to see if they had even planned to do it. I didn't find anything on plans for them to offer web broadcasts, however I did find this...

    http://mediahopper.com/portal.htm [mediahopper.com]
    An information hub for international live and pre-recorded web broadcasts.... apparantely this is not such a

  • Where is the license text? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Homology (639438) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @10:48AM (#12813697)
    I looked around the site for the license, but the closest I could find was :

    ACTLab TV is built upon the philosophy of open source and Copyleft media.

    An actual license text is appreciated.

  • Winamp already does this with their Media Library. They have near hundreds of streams from people, it definatly worth a look. I mean, how else can you watch simpsons, futurama, and seinfeld while at work?
  • Q. Who gets to decide what content gets shown?

    The members of the ACTLab TV community sort through submissions and organize them into thematically-related programs. While we won't be able to show everything we're given, we will go through it all and serve you the very best. To learn more about the people who run ACTLab TV stop by our PEOPLE page.

    Well, we shall see just how far they support the concept of free speech..
    I see people go on all the time about it but they only REALLY support free speech that

  • Great! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GMFTatsujin (239569) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @11:09AM (#12813982) Homepage
    I like that projects like these are under active development and getting a lot of attention.

    I have to ask, though, why require the download of yet *another* media application to use it?

    Would it be possible to make a plugin of the protocol for gstreamer, WMP, or any of the already established multimedia players?
  • To really get traction, these people are going to have to get people to encode video for their special system, get people to install their special system and get their friends to do the same.

    However, there are pieces already out there for this sort of thing that people are already using. RSS to track a program for new episodes. Bittorrent to distribute. FFMpeg (and others) for codec/format support.

    There is no practical reason to reinvent the wheel as far as these basic components. But there is a very
    • Hi, I am a member of the ACTLab TV team and I wanted to address some things in your post. We are, in fact, using FFMpeg for encoding along with a number of other Open Source and low-cost software packages. We are also currently working on creating guides on how to capture, transcode and publish content for our stream, as well as documentation on how to create original content and manage your own station.

  • Where's the hardware? (Score:3)

    by dspyder (563303) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @11:56AM (#12814565)
    I know most of you guys don't, but I choose to watch TV in my family room. On my big plasma TV. Where's the set-top-box that can easily find, select, and play this content? I heard they're doing IPTV for porn sites, are those boxes useful for anything else like this? --D

  • Use the Internet Archive instead (Score:3, Informative)

    by Animats (122034) on Tuesday June 14 2005, @12:05PM (#12814663) Homepage
    Unlike these new guys, who are all player, no content, visit the Internet Archive Moving Images collection [archive.org]. They have actual content. 5344 open source movies and counting, plus a big collection of historical films.

    And you don't need some wierd player, either. The Internet Archive offers video in about five different formats, including editable quality versions for use in other works.

    • I doubt that would happen. It is more cost efficient for tWiT to podcast because it only requires audio recording, which is less time consuming to edit than video recording. It would be nice to see systm or from the shadows utilize this medium.
      • No need to a podcast to stay audio.

        I can well imagine a future version of ipodder/itunes which allows you to podcast .mov files.

    • Re:Not convinced (Score:5, Interesting)

      by brontus3927 (865730) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <3ardrawde>> on Tuesday June 14 2005, @10:42AM (#12813598) Homepage Journal
      You mean like Napoleon Dynamite [imdb.com] with a budget of $400,000 including post-production and grossed $44.5m? Or maybe Blair Witch Project whose production budget was $35,000 and had a worldwide gross of over $248m?

      The reason most "major" cinema houses don't play more independent films is because more sheep^H^H^H people are interested in seeing the lastest Vin Deisel film or other movie that had such a large advertising budget that you can't escape. Movie theaters want to make money, so they play films that they think will make them the most money. Indies only get played when there's a lull (few major releases come out during the autumn) and they can be gotten for extremely cheap, otherwise, you've got the local multiplex still devoting half their screens to Star Wars a month after release.

      I think this has incredible potential, if people get behind it. There is already a huge underground of short films. Unless you subscribe to the Sundance Channel or are a regular to websites like i-film [ifilm.com] you will very likely never see any of this. BMW films, Google video, ACTLab. The movement is fractured, but it is there. Think of it more like the state of OSS a decade ago

        • Reading your original (I'm assuming your the same Anonymous Coward that posted what I replied to in the first place) again, I see that you did specify OSV. Okay, you got me there. To your underlying point of why isn't open source video being shown in major theaters, that's kind of asking why BestBuy doesn't have more linux software.

          1) If you thought The Pacifier was good cinema, then yes, I'll call you a sheep all day long.
          2)I have never had a latte in my life, or an esspresso, or a cappaccino. I did

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