BitTorrent opens kimono, gets out one-to-many streaming tool

BitTorrent’s live streaming protocol has finally emerged into the daylight after years of development. The beta program is now public. You can try it. The broadcast data is assigned to small groups - "clubs" - which then share the stream with a UDP protocol. Congestion control is added at the last hop. There’s more detail in …

[Anonymous Coward]

Not new

Acestream (Stream torrent) has being doing this for a bit now.

[Daniel B.]

BT Multicast!

So basically, it's the BitTorrent way of doing multicast. Hope it works behind NAT, given the ISPs out there trying to force that awful thing upon end-users...

[Alan Brown]

Re: BT Multicast!

Except multicast usually doesn't work because most ISPs refuse to support it.

This appears a reasonable compromise regarding ISP pigheadedness.

[mANgLEr]

Sopcast seems to do it adequately as well.

[Crisp]

Looks like everyone will have the potential to be famous for fifteen minutes

I wonder what they will become famous for...

[Dan 55]

In other words, it's a torrent

The file is just passed between peers in sequential order instead of random order so it can be displayed when it's received.

[bag o' spanners]

Just guessing, but I think it will be a useful tool for those underground pirate radio types who resent intrusion and extortion by the RIAA and BFI. I can also see a few niche content providers using it to avoid censorious blocking.

[Crisp]

Re: niche content

Fnar Fnar!

[bill 36]

Can't get it to work

Not on XP pro anyway.

maybe its been built for Windoze 8 of course :>)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oddly I think "broadcasting" (as in through the air)...

I don' t think it's odd at all; broadcasting is lightyears ahead of the Internet for "live" TV.

[JeffyPooh]

What ever happened to multicast?

Giving up on Multicast are we?

.:confused:.

[Jamie Jones]

Re: What ever happened to multicast?

RTFA !!

[h3]

Re: What ever happened to multicast?

People seem to be trying everything possible to not use ipv6 (Where multicast just works unless it is specifically and deliberately broken).

[HarshKarma]

Expect to see BitTorrent (Live) pirates streaming freeview/sky across the internet before long...

[Mick H]

Well it works

Just tried it with windows 7 using firefox. Works very nicely, now BBC take lessons and fix iPlayer =)

[MrXavia]

Great, BUT I can see the networks not being happy... suddenly they are getting a lot more upstream traffic than they are used to.. and with the new 300/30 connections over fiber. that might be A LOT of data!

Expect it to be traffic managed unless some big name takes off with it...

[Grave]

i'm sure big media will be happy, after all you will be paying for the privilege to watch paid content. (you will have to pay for and with your bandwidth over which they spread their content, for which you have to pay of course. moving the expense of streaming content onto the customers, and savings into big media coffers).

[roselan]

I did not dive into details yet, but if it follows ip usual hoops routing, ISP will be happy.

If a bunch of end users get their stream from a mini-broadcaster inside an ISP network, and not from the original source outside it, the isp will pay less for interconnection.

But of course, if the thing works so well that the total traffic explodes x10, we may feel it on our monthly invoice.

I wonder how the protocol works with "pause" and peer disconnections. Buffers management must be fun :) I have to read the real thing (damn customer stupidwall).

beer coz it's time!

[Jeff Power]

Sounds a fair bit like Joost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost