Peer-to-Peer Internet Television

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."

TSS

[ch0p]

I'd expect to see The Screen Savers switch to this format, instead of a podcast.

neet

[Amouth]

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

[ProfaneBaby]

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.

Re:Heh

[Vobbo]

Actually, a company like BITV [broadcastitv.com] is more like internet cable access...

Bit Torrent TV

[StreetFire.net]

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

Also see Broadcast Machine

[Wesley Felter]

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.

Re:Big Whoop

[birkhouse]

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 could therefore produce raunchy cartoons on internet public access as easily as DIY programs are currently screened on channel 13.

Finally Slashdot Video can start

[Raindeer]

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.

Re:neet

[tomhudson]

2 words:

video spam

I'm joking (I think).

Seriously, how long before the marketroids try to appropriate this? Only time will tell. My bet is it'll be a race between them and Google.

Re:Not convinced

[brontus3927]

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

Where is the license text?

[Homology]

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.

Great!

[GMFTatsujin]

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?