Video Distribution Platform Aiming to Kill TV 207
skaterperson writes "I just read about Downhill Battle's new open source video platform - a publishing tool based off of BattleTorrent and a video player written in Python. They've started a whole new organization to sponsor the project. They say "TV channels" will be made out of RSS feeds and anybody can subscribe to another user's content channel. The system is being designed for the express purpose of putting broadcasting in the hands of individuals. I like this idea of using recent advances in filesharing and syndication to allow aggregated content to be delivered to your desktop. There is a radio show on the project available at echoradio." The project is just getting underway, with a (hopeful) launch date sometime in June of this year.
BlogTorrent, not BattleTorrent (Score:3, Informative)
Manhattan (Score:3, Informative)
"Anybody can submit a show to MNN for air as a series or special. It should be 28 or 58 minutes long. Manhattan residents and non profits get priority. Find out more at questions. "
If Manhattan of NYC is this easy, image how easy it is in any other town...
Re:BlogTorrent, not BattleTorrent (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Content? (Score:2, Informative)
Sometimes we have a message, sometimes a new rendering technique, and sometimes we just want to entertain, but we're not so greedy or proud as to charge 20-30 bucks for DRM disk and downloads. People like us HATE the broadcast flag, DRM, and Hollywood in general making content pushes more difficult. While this won't kill TV, it sure will help indies without corporate agendas find a voice.
Re:P2P Radio? (Score:1, Informative)
It lives on in Internet2 (Score:5, Informative)
http://multicast.internet2.edu/ [internet2.edu]
At the University of Wisconsin, our new 10Gbps ethernet backbone and all associated equipment in a major network upgrade initiative [wisc.edu] supports multicast to the desktop. We're operating an IP-based television distribution system exclusively via multicast distribution (using locally scoped addresses, so it's only available internally).
So we can still go to 224.2.231.45, and get a live stream of NASA TV from the University of Oregon.
For the uninitiated, multicast essentially allows any number of clients to "listen" to the same stream: multicast-aware network equipment just handles when a network gets traffic. If a user on the University of Wisconsin campus decides to watch the broadcast from the University of Oregon, one stream's worth of bandwidth will enter our network. If a hundred - or a thousand - people decide to watch it, it's still that same one stream's worth of bandwidth coming in, that everyone else is simply "listening" to. So for each network segment, whether you're looking at an individual subnet or in a whole-internet sense, there is either:
- 0 streams
- 1 or more streams, but all with the equivalent network usage of 1 stream
It's really a fantastic way of distributing video. Not only is there no additional load beyond the one stream on the network, but there is also *only the load of one stream* on the server.
If multicast were enabled on the internet-at-large, individual people really could distribute video to the world: all they'd need is essentially enough bandwidth to distribute one stream, and one, or one million, could listen in.
(And yes, there are ways this can break down, but I'm just trying to give a simplified explanation here.)