BitTorrent Live's 'Cable Killer' P2P Video App Finally Hits iOS (techcrunch.com) 37
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: BitTorrent has now done for live video what it did for file downloads: invented peer-to-peer technology that moves the burden of data transfer from a centralized source to the crowd. Instead of cables and satellites, BitTorrent piggybacks on the internet bandwidth of its users. Since P2P live streaming is so much cheaper than traditional ways to deliver live content, BitTorrent could pay channel owners more for distribution per viewer. And BitTorrent can offer that content to viewers for free or much cheaper than a cable subscription. The transfer technology and the app that aggregates these channels are both called BitTorrent Live. Now, almost a year after the protocol's debut on smart TVs, and six months after it was supposed to arrive on iPhone, the BitTorrent Live app quietly became available on iOS this week. Until now it's only existed on Mac, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV -- much less popular platforms. And that's after being in development since 2009. The app features 15 channels, including NASA TV, France One, QVC Home and TWiT (This Week In Tech) that you can watch live. The latency is roughly 10 seconds, which could be faster than terrestrial cable, as well as systems like Sling TV that can delay content more than a minute. The problem right now is that BitTorrent Live has a pretty lackluster channel selection. It's still working on striking deals with more name-brand channels. It could offer some for pay-per-view, but cheaper than the same content on traditional TV due to the reduced broadcasting costs.
Irrelevant (Score:2)
Bittorrent will not supplant current methods. The transmission costs are marginal. What costs the real money are the right to transmit, ie. licensing fees. Only for "free" content, the transmission costs matter, things like youtube or as here, public channels, shopping channels, etc. ie where the content is free or pretty much worthless.
Besides: streaming via bittorrent exists for quite some time now, but as all things bittorrent which is at the actual technical edge, it's streaming illegal content: Popcorn
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asymmetric DSL and Cable connections. (Score:2)
Another possible achilles heel here is that these days most household connections are asymmetric with piddly upload rates. You actually need the upload rate to just to negotiate the download requests too. So one will need to have vastly greater numbers of seeders than viewers for this to work using the edge of the network.
invented p2p? (Score:2)
Modern P2P file sharing arguably started with Napster and eDonkey in 1999, not BitTorrent. But even those systems really just represented a mass market adoption of earlier methods that people had used to share files on the Internet and even on USENET.
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"Peer-to-peer technology" has existed since like... some of the first network games.
DOOM ran peer-to-peer.
Fun fact: As soon as they launched it they went "Oh shit, that means anyone who hacks their... can cheat? What have we done?!" (John Romero on a GDC talk) Quake would be client-server after that. Quakeworld was the first (or one of the first) major game to support latency compensation. Quake was completely tested "in house" on LANs and their dedicated T1/T3 or whatever and when people tried to play on t
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I guess if I'm splitting hairs, peer-to-peer likely predated any games too. I should have worded that better to point out that a major, well-known product was running peer-to-peer a LONG time ago.
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I view it in generations:
Generation zero: Pre-p2p. Dump sites, BBSs, FTP servers.
Generation one: Fully centralised control/search, distributed hosting: Napster, early bittorrent, kazaa/fasttrack, ED2K
Generation two: Decentralised or fully distributed: Kad, bittorrent with DHT, gnutella.
France One (Score:2)
The app features 15 channels, including NASA TV, France One
Is "France One" supposed to be TF1 [wikipedia.org]? It seems the web does not know anything about "France One"
Won't work (Score:2)
ISVs are already shutting down ports between customers. Also billing for every byte into or out of the router - including DDoS traffic.
TWC blocked ports above 1024 between their regional lans. If you were in Chicago, you could hit say port 4800 in Dallas. But if you were in Houston, you couldn't hit 4800 in Austin, but Chicago was just fine.
Spectrum bought out TWC and I don't have nearly the trouble any more, but that's not saying service prices aren't going up, because - Lookie there! - they are. I will sa
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You are quite right. Are we expecting cable companies to just willingly foot the distribution costs for a service that competes with them? So long as BitTorrent Live is a niche little thing, they will ignore it - but if it takes off, you can bet that 'traffic management' will become suddenly a much bigger concern for them.
Maybe if the election had gone the other way the FCC might have been able to make them play nice for a time, but eventually they would find a way around any regulation.
The big joke to me i
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.
Since I pay my ISV for transit, yes, I expect them to actually provide the service I'm (over) paying them for. This is frequently the logical fallacy employed by telecoms when they describe people that use their transit as "data hogs not paying their fair share".
Operational costs of a network like a cable or telephone system are quite low. The real cost is in the network establishment, which is paid for by the builders of
Given that net neutrality is about to go pop (Score:2)
for iOS really? (Score:2)
'piggybacking on the bandwidth of users' is not such a problem if it's a desktop app, but how does that work for mobile users with tiny data caps (e.g. all of canada)
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You can disallow cellular data on an app-by-app basis.
So it's another version of AceStream? (Score:2)
AceStream has been around and just works. Lots of streaming sports and live shows, just not much "legit" programming.
hahahahaha (Score:4, Funny)
Small cable here. We already have cord cutters coming back for video. Seems like a netflix, amazon and hulu accounts eats up you're pocket book just as much as a cable subscription does. Not to mention any premium content you may want like HBO or showtime. I hate to say I told you so, no really don't hate that.
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Small cable here. We already have cord cutters coming back for video. Seems like a netflix, amazon and hulu accounts eats up you're pocket book just as much as a cable subscription does. Not to mention any premium content you may want like HBO or showtime. I hate to say I told you so, no really don't hate that.
Yea, OK. I pay $42 a month for Hulu, Netflix, HBO Now, and Amazon Prime. Including Prime is a bit over the top since I had prime before I cut the cord, but let's put it in there for a worst-case. That covers 99% of my TV watching. My locals I can get over the air and if I need, I can always grab a OTA DVR but as of now it's not really something I've needed. When I cancelled my cable, I was paying about $75 a month for just the TV content.
Plus, unlike cable, I can easily cut and re-add services as I see
Donald Trump TV? (Score:1)