
BitTorrent Live: Cheap, Real-Time P2P Video Streaming That Will Kill TV - brianbreslin
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/13/bittorrent-live/
======
dotBen
The problem is, and always has been, on the content side.

Most people in the mainstream still want to spend their time watching
mainstream shows - and no mainstream US-based content holder is interested in
offering internet-based streaming of their TV channels (as a live stream of
the live broadcast). If they were, they would have done so already.

[this just launched today, and read the cavets:
[http://allthingsd.com/20120213/barry-diller-gets-into-the-
co...](http://allthingsd.com/20120213/barry-diller-gets-into-the-cord-cutting-
business/)]

Case in point: There is no Comfast Xfinity or Dish style subscription that is
online only that doesn't require a cable box or dish as your primary source of
reception. I'm sure everyone on Hacker News would love to subscribe such a
service but the rights holders are having none of it.

What's stopping these companies is not that they can't push the bits but that
they want to protect their existing investments and not find themselves in a
commoditized and highly competitive market with many players.

Comcast in most markets has no competition for cable, Dish has no competition.
They don't want to race to the bottom and compete with upstart startups that
we might be running - so they're playing hard ball with the rights holders (or
they are the rights holders too - Comcast owns NBC) and having none of it.

I like Bram, I like this technology and I think there are lots of awesome
things we (away from mainstream) can do with it.

But it won't kill TV because the majority of people want mainstream content.
And that's going to sit on TV (in some form) for some time to come.

~~~
pat2man
There is a reason that Apple (not Napster) killed the physical CD. To digitize
the TV distribution network we need someone with the legal team to properly
negotiate these licenses. BitTorrent is already here, it already distributes
TV and the networks will never use it.

The future of TV first involves someone like Apple or Google working with the
content providers and the ISPs to provide a solution that everyone can agree
with (probably with DRM). This is what happened with music, it will happen
again with TV.

What his really provides is a way for two generations from now to steam media,
but it's dilusional to think that this technology is what people will be using
that far into the future.

~~~
dotBen
"The future of TV first involves someone like Apple or Google working with the
content providers and the ISPs to provide a solution"

Won't happen. The music industry handed, well, the music industry to Apple on
a plate. The wider media watched, learned and face slapped.

Apple and Google are far too powerful for the media to hand any more of that
kind of control to. Watch how Google really is struggling to get industry
partnership with Google Music.

With Hulu we saw major players (NBC, ABC and Fox) come together and build out
a solution themselves.

My guess is that any future internet-based "TV subscription service" will come
from a similar joint venture. The technology isn't that difficult so why hand
over the keys to a 3rd party when they can own things themselves?

My personal aspiration is that the %age of the population who want to buy tv
subscriptions (by whatever medium - cable, dish, internet) will actually
decrease and the power will shift away from the existing incumbents simply
providing the same service over a new medium but to actually something
radically different.

~~~
nextparadigms
Google should just put more focus on their artist hub, and promote that. They
should promote the decentralized of the music industry and indie artists, and
not beg for scraps from the big labels.

~~~
dotBen
As an indie music lover, I totally agree.

As a GOOG holder, I fear that isn't a big enough addressable market to make it
worth while.

My personal view on this is that if Google can't get first citizen rights with
the music industry like Apple and Amazon have, then they should focus entirely
on having a strong music locker service which supports user's "grey" music (ie
who knows, who cares where the mp3 came from).

This would then add massive value to owning Android (which I do, and the
cloud-based Google Music is a killer app). Google Music is not available on
Apple, I don't believe.

------
staunch
The problem is, and always has been, on the client side. It's easy to dream up
all sorts of amazing technologies if you're okay with making users download a
new browser plugin or app.

Flash sucks, but it's on every single PC. Netflix has the power to get users
to install Silverlight -- Microsoft made that pretty easy. Unfortunately you
probably don't have their library and will live to regret it[1].

Adobe is also working on this idea with RTMFP (their newest streaming
protocol)[2]

In fact few years there's been a company already doing this with a Flash
Plugin (Yes dawg, there's a Plugin in my Plugin).[3] CNN use(d) it for quite a
while.

I wouldn't bet anything on BitTorrent adding anything interesting here. The
technology may be difficult but it's not as difficult as overcoming the huge
barriers to entry.

The best we can hope for is that they create an open protocol the way they did
with BitTorrent that browsers can implement over the next 5+ years.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost#Application_discontinued>

2\. <http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/>

3\. <http://www.octoshape.com/addin/about.php>

~~~
smokinn
On the other hand bittorrent live has great distribution channels: The Pirate
Bay et al.

There will be many people wanting to "stream bittorrent" and it'll get at
least close to critical mass. Whether it can tip over into the mainstream will
be the real question.

One example I could see is justin.tv that's betting heavily (with their
twitch.tv site) on esports which I'm pretty sure has a good overlap with
people who know/use bittorrent.

Another of course will be megaupload/megavideo v2.0.

It's definitely something worth following.

~~~
lambda
But, BitTorrent Live has nothing to do with BitTorrent, besides the inventor
and the name. It's a completely new, proprietary protocol. You need to
download their proprietary software to view it. You can't view existing
torrents with it; so the Pirate Bay doesn't provide it with a distribution
channel.

One of the reasons that BitTorrent took off as well as it did was that it was
an open protocol and free software. People could write competing BitTorrent
clients. They could extend the protocol, adding new features like trackerless
torrents and magnet links.

BitTorrent Live has none of that; it's yet another proprietary streaming
service, designed to create a walled garden that the content industry can be
happy with. It will succeed or fail based on how well BitTorrent Inc can cut
content deals, and cut deals with set-top-box manufacturers to include their
software. And that's not really a game that you want to be in, unless you have
a lot of leverage like Apple or Amazon, or the backing of big content
companies like Hulu.

------
ChrisNorstrom
= What I _wished_ and _thought_ BitTorrent Live was going to be =

Pirated P2P TVOIP with 1 minute delay:

People with REALLY good computers and TV capture cards would record and encode
video streams in real time and would seed them out through Bittorent Live. The
video might not be in real time but even a 1 minute delay would be fine. Hey
live TV and Cable over IP would be awesome. My mom's been wanting to watch the
Opera Winfrey Network so badly I'd love to get it working on the laptop.
Commercials and all. Hell, the woman in me would love to watch it too.

Yeah it's "pirating", but we do it because content creators don't give us what
we want. I don't care about licenses I just want the Operah Winfrey Network,
NATGEO, and the Science Channel.

Piracy is the only way to make it work. Television, Film, & Music are stagnant
industries that refuse to evolve unless and until they are forced to. And the
Pirates have to innovate here, I believe.

------
newhouseb
It's always funny to read about P2P TV being sold as the cutting edge in the
western world, when in fact China has been using P2P TV since 2004. I've used
both PPLive and SOPCast to varying degrees of success in the 'states and
according to wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPLive>) PPLive reported
105 million monthly active users in december 2010, so it's no small
phenomenon. The interesting question is which components of the media
environment in China allowed for the growth of such technology well ahead of
western users.

------
fungi
> “It fits the DNA of what BitTorrent is about because it’s open and free.”

> An SDK to work with the proprietary protocol is in the works.

I'm confused

------
wmf
I think this article is remiss in not mentioning the dozen or so P2P live
streaming systems that have been in production for years.

Without any details (really, _any at all_ ), it's hard to connect this
BitTorrent Live with the idea of killing TV. I agree that "people love what
they see on television, but want it accessible from the Web", but one of the
main reasons _why_ is that people don't want to watch TV live (other than
sports, which has even more geographical licensing problems than regular TV).

~~~
moreorless
TC and their over the top headlines. If we had a nickel for every time they
proclaim a killer of any entrenched industry leader, we would all be
millionaires.

~~~
wmf
I wouldn't really blame TC in this case; they're just quoting Bram. (It's an
irresistible quote; GigaOM ran with it too.)

~~~
aptwebapps
I would. They didn't just quote him. Here's the first para:

"Television is going the way of the dinosaur, and the deadly comet is called
BitTorrent Live. Today, Bram Cohen, the author of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer
sharing protocol, demoed his latest creation at the SF MusicTech Summit."

Nothing indicates that first sentence is a quote.

~~~
sanxiyn
It isn't, but this is:

""My goal is to kill off television" Cohen said during the SF MusicTech demo
session I hosted."

------
tomwalsham
Sports fans have been using live P2P streaming for many years, the most
obvious being Sopcast (sopcast.org - even the website is copyright 2007). The
quality is pretty good, and the 'danger' posed was made clear with some of the
first domain seizures being the stream aggregators - myp2p, rojadirecta etc.

The difficulty with this technology 'replacing TV' is that realtime is only
truly relevant for a few things - sports, maybe concerts and awards ceremonies
- beyond these the on-demand paradigm is much more attractive.

That's not to say that at scale a certain amount of bandwidth offloading
couldn't happen to equivalent-timecode peers, but I suspect the biggest
challenges to the complete overthrow of the cable networks model right now
involve the notorious impossibility of negotiating agreements with the content
owners, not the bandwidth/hardware cost of server-client streaming.

------
forrestthewoods
Meh, it's not solving the right problem to "kill TV". Content distribution
isn't an issue. Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, HBO Go and more are all
effective distribution mechanisms. At best this lowers the barrier of entry
which is good, but that's not the real problem.

The real issue is coming up with a sustainable business model that users are
willing to pay for. Thus far monthly then monthly cable bill plus ads is ahead
by a huge margin in terms of revenue. Content owners cutting out middle men is
a good step, but the harder one is getting users to pay for it.

Of course it could kill TV with copyright infringing streams, but that would
be illegal and send people to jail ala MegaUpload.

~~~
palish
_Content owners cutting out middle men is a good step, but the harder one is
getting users to pay for it._

Interesting. By definition, that means middlemen are currently adding value.

------
rll
For a good chunk of people it is still the cable companies that provide the
last-mile pipe that something like this requires. And because they control it
they can skew the bandwidth allocation towards their own digital TV side. You
never hit a Comcast bandwidth cap by watching too much cable TV. But you can
quite easily hit your "unlimited" bandwidth cap on the same pipe if you stream
too much video over that very same cable prompting nasty email warnings and
eventually termination of service. I don't see how BitTorrent Live addresses
this in any way.

~~~
mdaniel
As a pedantic note, I wonder if the cap is measured from your cable modem or
access to and from the Internet. Because if it's the latter (ever how
unlikely) then a P2P protocol _could_ make a difference.

~~~
rll
I suppose that scenario could exist somewhere. It definitely doesn't on
Comcast in the US.

~~~
mdaniel
I mean this in all honesty: how do you know that?

~~~
rll
Try a traceroute to your neighbour who is likely on the same physical Comcast
segment as you. It's not a simple 2-hop route. It goes way out and comes back.

------
chrischen
I'd be interested to know how this compares to Flash multicasting...
especially since Flash is already installed in most browsers.

[http://www.flashrealtime.com/multicast-explained-
flash-101-p...](http://www.flashrealtime.com/multicast-explained-
flash-101-p2p/)

------
BuddhaSource
Joost tried this with their P2P desktop client. I was really impressed with
the performance and latency.

Technology was one side of the story but in reality Joost failed to get
traction, I hope BitTorrent Live is able to make use of the technology may be
integrate with existing bit torrent clients.

------
mariuolo
It will end like Joost broadcasting second- and third-rate shows.

Technologies like this can indeed reduce infrastructure cost not having to
rely on expensive CDNs, but startups don't have the financial muscle to
acquire interesting contents.

------
dustingetz
spotify does this at music-scale:

"Spotify – Large Scale, Low Latency, P2PMusic-on-Demand Streaming" [1]

TLDR: getting low latency, low stutter playback is a lot more complicated than
bittorrent, but clearly possible, and already solved.

as dotBen points out, it doesn't prevent Spotify's business from getting re-
negotiated into the ground every 3 years by the ip rights-holders.

i would like to see the technology sponsored by a business or industry who
cares about freedom of information - like the press - otherwise it's just a
few nerds working on a startup. I mean, app, I mean, toy project.

[1] (googlecache)
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.csc.kth.se/~gkreitz/spotify-p2p10/spotify-p2p10.pdf)

------
netcan
wow. All this negativity and dismissiveness about what is potentially a good &
impactful technology.

if it works well, it could mean netflix that is free (the difference between
free & cheap is big). It might change what people watch (like youtube). It
might change how/if people pay for it.

yes. I agree tomorrow morning tv as we know it will be unchanged. I can see
lots of paths from here to someplace different that could involve such a
service.

~~~
Terretta
How does it make Netflix free when Netflix has to spend half a billion dollars
buying the content?

Netflix's content bill is far bigger than their bandwidth bill.

------
nextparadigms
This kind of technology should be integrated in the browsers, and obviously be
open source. Google should've been working on something like this for Youtube.
It would save them a lot of money. They wouldn't even need to use it 100% of
the time, just for the more popular videos who are constantly watched.

------
nachteilig
I'm not sure why sensationalist headlines like this are necessary. As has been
stated, the real problem is getting content. Lots of technologies exist that
could have "killed" TV but haven't.

------
shalmanese
Veetle (<http://veetle.com/>) has had a functioning demo of such a technology
live for at least a year now.

~~~
vetler
What is this?! The Twilight Zone?

Vetle is a fairly uncommon Norwegian name, and happens to be my first name.
Very weird.

