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.
Sounds awesome but will it actually work? (Score:3, Interesting)
This does sound like a really cool thing though. One thing I'm wondering about is whether this will actually work or not. I'm sure they must have done a fair bit of testing to have gotten this far with it but I have to wonder if something like BitTorrent would actually work for streaming video at consistently acceptable speeds. Don't get me wrong, BitTorrent is awesome and very often gives me great speeds but it just as often goes incredibly slow. As in 1-2KB/s slow.
Great... (Score:4, Interesting)
Putting publishing/broadcasting in the hands of The People has shown us one thing: The People are perverts.
Re:Metaphorically, one hopes (Score:2, Interesting)
Much of business strategy, especially the vernacular, is based on warfare. Chief executive officers. War rooms. Strategy itself. And so on.
You know I started reading this interesting book called Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant [amazon.com] which talks about this a little bit. The book basically makes a metaphor between Red Ocean which is traditional competitive markets aggressively competing against each other that turns the ocean into a pool of red. Then you have blue ocean markets which is about finding a new market space and making the competition back in the red ocean irrelevant. Really interesting stuff. Check out the amazon reviews sometime.
Where is it going? (Score:3, Interesting)
No more religious-right influence on content.
No more psy-ops programs at weekday prime-time.
Girlfriend, you've got your own TV show...
I for one welcome our self-producing-TV-show overlord masters. The previous ones were crap!!
Nope (Score:2, Interesting)
Podcasting is beginning to creep into this, but there aren't more than about a dozen "real" (i.e. not produced originally as a podcast) programs being podcast (e.g. BBC 'In Our Time', Virgin Radio 'Pete and Geoff Show', WGBH Morning Stories), and these aren't otherwise commercially available.
The chances of '24' being made available on the web by the producers when they'd rather sell DVDs is unlikely, unless there's some damned efficient DRM going on. (Yes, I am ignoring the possibility of RSS feeds for non-official copies these shows being made available by third parties).
Without that sort of 'pro' content available to its competition, TV won't be going anywhere soon.
Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame" (Score:3, Interesting)
This is about the lowering of cost on broadcast and near broadcast quality production means, (DV, HDV, Final Cut Pro, Avid Xpress DV) to the level at which you can have a low cost to get these tools into the hands of a whole team, and work out non-traditional workflows to produce and distribute - this is about the future of the change in workflow and now, the change in distrobution. Many people are working on this model, because they know we are out there (many of us) people that specialize in looking at the whole medium, not just it's individual parts and are working to produce creative in these directions. We've been here taking website and new media contracts, as well as working towards new content mechanisims (partiualrly in next gen music production and promotion) because we know that some day, the distro is coming.
Watch out- content needs creative and there are many groups like ours waiting for the opportunity to innovate creative for a new medium, that is not monopoly controlled but still advertiser viable. This one might be the hit, and it might not- but it is coming.
Now if they would only widen the pipes.
Who wants the MBONE, huh? huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
But the MBONE broke down. Because there weren't enough multicast addresses to go around. Because multicast had scaling issues with the way feeds got pruned when the # and size of data sources grew large.
Now, even today, multicast is the forgotten cousin who sits alone under the tree. Corporate networks rarely run PIM or enable multicast. It doesn't even get enabled in small ponds, despite lots of books from guys like Beau Williamson on how to configure it. It gets ignored in the face of a plethora of multicast client and multicast capable encoders.
Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, got rich selling broadcast.com. The idea was something akin to Rob Glaser and Real, bring streaming video to the masses. Except we have to use unicast and spend our time making tweaks to UDP at the application layer, because that's the only way it will work. Because we can't even create a central organization to manage DNS correctly, much less be issuing and retrieving a scare commodity of multicast IP addresses. People will hog them! The television networks will get the FCC! Boo hoo!
Shame really. The promise of watching community produced tv from any garage in the world now falls to projects like these, which fall back on bitTorrent to recreate the essential function of a multicast routing protocol: to overlap a node tree map on the internet.
Perhaps this reinvention of the wheel one more time will get it working. But this problem comes up every so often, and I think it will take Internet 2 and IPv6 to solve it correctly. Until then, it's just sharing rips of tv shows off cable and sat, and not the net population ignoring the traditional mediums and making their own shows. It'll be another decade before that shift happens.
Relevant? Depends on the timeframe (Score:3, Interesting)
And where is it going? I haven't a clue - and frankly analyzing the impact of this requires a proper timeframe.
How long will it take to get off the ground? What kind of content will be produced and what kind of content production tolls will evolve in the next few years? Will there be an overwhelming amount of crap - and if so, will there then be a die-off-pull-back effect that leaves better content, or what?
My wife is a ad designer who does video editing as a hobby and as a professional. She's watched the tools for broadcast and video editing change radically in the seven years she's done it, watched companies rise and fall. Communication is an odd, tricky, unpredictable business, and this initaitive will be just as hard to assess.
But it also SOUNDS damn cool.
A reality-TV show that's actually useful? (Score:3, Interesting)
But with this tech, and a comm-link of some sort, existing development teams could broadcast their own shows. Might help out with recruitment and donations.
--jrd
Re:Sounds awesome but will it actually work? (Score:2, Interesting)
crappy popular shit like Survivor and American Idol = Great speed! HDTV quality!!
Educational shows, documentaries, GOOD sci-fi/drama with good plots and stories without pandering to the masses and LCD = Shitty speed and quality
diamonds in the rough... (Score:5, Interesting)
While this is true, for the most part, there WILL be lots of good stuff coming out of this too, and you can't disregard it.
Look, if this catches on, it will be exactly what happened to music with the advent of home computers... suddenly, everyone and their mother could write tracks. People started publishing them. Yes, there was a LOT of crap. BUT -- there was still a good proportion of awesome music being made by people who otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity. You had to look for it.. but then along came netlabels, who filtered it all for you... then you just have to find the good netlabels... but my point is that the MORE, the BETTER. the more opportunity for crap, means more opportunity for GOLD, too.
there might be some really good stuff coming out of this, and I'm sure you'll all be subscribing to the best "channels" of it.
Re:This scares me. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame" (Score:3, Interesting)
In those cases you will find people that provide access to RSS selections. Different people will set up a collection of RSS selections and probably sell that selection to the less knowing. We see that today with News Services. How much of the news from CNN or Times come from Reuters or Associated Press, and then some of their own.
Wow, the RIAA's gonna like this... Not. (Score:3, Interesting)
A compromise... (Score:3, Interesting)
1) The program is provided in original format WITH Commercials and credits as originally broadcast. If someone paid money to make something you either pay for it or respect the way they earn their money(ie commercials). You can always fast forward.
2) No wildfeeds...no broadcasting programs here before they are broadcast by the original distributor unless the original distributor is defunct or does not intend to air the program in that area.
The right of first broadcast ought to mean something. The people who made the program ought to have the right to broadcast it first.
Tivos FUTURE! (Score:4, Interesting)
Its been hinting at this for awhile with service providers moving from one delevery type to a information delevery type. For example phone companies are changing from specifically phone use, to high speed providers that can do phone among other things.
Just think that at some point in the future, TV companies will not be associated with a channel, but more related to a website. For example, instead of going to channel 23 for Cartoon Network to watch Anime, you may go to their website and get a feed to watch the shows you like. No "TV" channels will even exist. That downloadable chunck will have a small set of ads with it so they can get their revenue. Ads targeted a bit more directly at their consumer as well.
Its like a SUPER Season Pass for the Tivo crowds. If Tivo is smart they will jump at this immediately. Even extend this to SUPER Season Pass podcast radio shows. Wicked cool.
Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame" (Score:3, Interesting)
If this platform takes off with the geeks then the content will be out there and the geeks will make a knoppix distro that you control with a remote. Now all grandma has to do is buy an E-machine at wallmart, pick up a supported remote and plug her computer into the TV and internet. Pick up the remote, subscribe to some shows and drink some tea while she waits for the shows to stream in.
Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame" (Score:2, Interesting)
but they are trying to make the clients for both ends of the process easier for the normal user to approach.
There is no reason that the average user needs to care about the specifics of how video programs actually get there so long as they can push a button and watch them. You don't have to know anything about satellite transmission to sign up for The Dish Network or about fibre optics to subscribe to cable. With appropriate clients, users won't -need- to know anythign about RSS feeds.
It may be that their attempts to build simplified clients meant for the average user will fail, but saying that they cannot suceed because users aren't technical enough to use it is not a valid criticism of a project whose whole point is to make things accessible to non-technical users.
Keith Irwin
How This WILL work (Score:3, Interesting)
But thats not what its going to be. Sure Napster gave everyone in the world the ability to distribute their own Music over p2p. Sure Shoutcast gave everyone a change to run a radio station playing legal unprotected music. Sure, Bittorent gives everyone the ability to easally share large legal files, such as home videos or GNU software. Sure, Winamp's Shoutcast TV gives people the ability to stream there own telivision shows Right Now (yes there are technical diferences bear with me).
But did they?
No. Napster was at the top of its game because people shared copywritten mp3s. Shoutcast worked because everyone could take the mp3 collections they got from Napster, build up there own playlist, and stream music for their friends. BitTorrent make it easy to get Everything people wanted, epecially Movies and TV Shows. Winamp's TV has well Porn, Crap, and People breaking the law. Just open it up, look at the streams. The streams running say 24/7 South Park or 24/7 Scrubs, are they legal? Do you really think any money is going to the copywrite holders?
This will work because it will make it so ANYONE with a halfway decent connection will be able to seed what ever they want, their personal selection of digital media constantly. Say Joe Kid with his 7mbit/1mbit dsl starts a Sapranoes all day every day. Or Jane Kid starts Her own version of The Movie Channel, using her favorite XVID releases she got from bittorent. Shoutcast didnt get popular because it gave people a place to my thier own music, it got popular because it gave people a place where they could play the DJ. This will get popular because it will give everyone with a halfway decent upload the ablity to play Zero Cool his first "hacking" at the age of 18, Running the tv STATION, not the production.