Internet TV
Posted on April 13th, 2005 by JTkPosted in Geek, media |
When I posted the Distributed IP Based Media Delivery I could have never guessed how close I was to something that was being currently developed. The are obvious differences between The Participatory Culture Foundation’s Internet TV and what I had proposed, but the similarities are striking:
Announcing a new platform for Internet television and video. Anyone can broadcast full-screen video to thousands of people at virtually no cost, using BitTorrent technology. Viewers get intuitive, elegant software to subscribe to channels, watch video, and organize their video library. The project is non-profit, open source, and built on open standards…
Bit Torrent isn’t robust enough to handle what I was talking about, but it is the same idea, for sure. While my original post had a pay per model, this one is free to watch and to publish - pro’s and con’s there. Internet Tv is being designed to support the public interest and independent media - which is noble, but they are going to need significant compelling content to bring this to critical mass. The majority of the people that create compelling content are used to getting paid for it…
That aside this is a great development, and I can’t wait to see if it catches on, and if so what type of stuff gets published, and how long until some lobbying group tries to shut it down or sue it’s users.
An alternative to bit torrent is dijjer (http://dijjer.org). It’s a p2p distrubted web cache. You put your file on a standard http server, but the dijjer network (in theory) greatly reduces server load.