

Calling All Broadcasters - marioestrada
http://blog.bittorrent.com/2012/11/20/calling-all-broadcasters/
Do you have a Ustream channel? A justin.tv following? A webcam, and a dream? Do you want to help invent the next generation of live streaming? Cool. We’re looking for people like you.
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kzahel
There's a lot of times that I'm watching something on YouTube that's broadcast
live (like presidential debates) when I wish there was a less corporate, ad
infested version where it was available. I think a P2P solution for events
like this would be really cool. I've seen BitTorrent live evolve over the last
few years and it's really beginning to mature. It still hasn't seen a swarm at
that kind of scale, though.

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ams6110
Are you opposed in general to people earning money by providing you streaming
content you're interested in, or would you prefer to pay for it directly
rather than have ads?

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jiggy2011
I never understood why torrent clients are not built into browsers and the
defacto means of download. Would be huge cost savings.

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kzahel
Opera has (had?) one built in. The difficulty is the necessity of hashing the
entire file. Torrents are great for snapshots of large files.

I think one of the reasons the torrent protocol is not built-in is that it's
simply more complicated and the user experience is not as good.

Or perhaps it is because there is a certain stigma attached to using a
technology that enables distribution of data, even when it is against the
wishes of the creator of the data.

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ZoFreX
Note to anyone planning on using Opera's client: it's terrible, out of spec,
and banned on many bittorrent sites.

I don't think the complexity and user experience issues are completely
intrinsic to the protocol - BitTornado (sadly, another client that misbehaves,
and hasn't been updated in 6 years) was hands-down the easiest for less techy
people to use and understand. (Each download has its own window and instance
of the program, making it look and feel very similar to downloading in
Internet Explorer)

Why do you say the difficulty is in hashing the entire file? BitTorrent
divides the files into small chunks and hashes those, so downloading lots of
small files vs downloading one big one doesn't make a lot of difference

(with a few caveats - some clients support an additional hash on each file,
which can save you re-downloading data if two files share a block and only one
is changed, and some clients add padding data so there is only one file per
block. In practice, these are both very rare)

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tarkin2
I'd like to see people streaming demonstrations etc using this.

And then others could make the stream more resilient.

I installed the client in Debian and live.bittorrent.com worked well with
Chrome at least.

Once I see open source clients and streamers, then I'll be really excited.

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joeguilmette
I hope YouTube et al are asleep at the wheel long enough for this to take
control of large scale live events away from them - the Baumgartner jump, the
debates, it'd be nice to see these handled by P2P technology...

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marshray
Well, maybe. In reality they really only need their hands on the control
channel (whatever that is here) and can leave the bulk data delivery to peer-
to-peer routing like the internet was designed for.

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thebutter21
Seems like a viable solution for a lot different content producers. NASA
included:

[http://nasaweb.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Cut-Costs-By-Using-
BitTor...](http://nasaweb.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Cut-Costs-By-Using-BitTorrent-
Live-Stream/296563-19702)

~~~
mtgx
Maybe this way they won't get their video taken down for copyright
infringement next time they land something on another planet.

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EvanAnderson
Bittorrent always makes me think about transfer-capped Internet connections.
It feels like even wireline-based Internet connections in the USA are moving
toward being transfer-capped. I don't see how Bittorrent works in that world.

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chadfarth83
This seems like a very useful tool for people who cannot afford big servers.

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vitovito
It's interesting that Bram (I assume it's still Bram's show over there) has
finally gone with a new streaming-optimized protocol design. We argued about
it years ago.

Here's Bram in 2004 arguing that _live_ streaming is a niche market:
<http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/4294.html>

In the comments, "streamerp2p" is discussed, which I used as the basis for a
proposal for live radio station streams along with Speex, back ~2005, when
bandwidth was expensive. It's still around, apparently:
<http://www.streamerp2p.com/>

Bittorrent itself can do streaming of static content: just request the blocks
in order. It can also do streaming of live content if you chunk the live
content and have an out-of-band way to update the torrent you're looking for,
but that's not great.

In my proposal I mention some other systems as well:

Peercast:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20060207013338/http://www.peercas...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060207013338/http://www.peercast.org/)
(defunct, Internet Archive link)

P2P-Radio: <http://p2p-radio.sourceforge.net/> (defunct)

Allcast:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20060805040005/http://allcast.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060805040005/http://allcast.com/)
(defunct, Internet Archive link)

Chaincast (dead and blocked from IA)

Abacast:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20061017041905/http://www.abacast...](http://web.archive.org/web/20061017041905/http://www.abacast.com/)
(IA link, they're still around but now cloud-based)

Xiph's IceShare: <http://wiki.xiph.org/IceShare> (defunct)

Robert Haarman's StreamDist prototype:
<http://inglorion.net.nyud.net:8090/software/#streamdist>

Andrew Brampton's research and prototype:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20100325135652/http://www.lancs.a...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100325135652/http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/brampton/fyp/)
(IA link)

Onion Networks' Swarmstreaming (defunct and blocked)

The proposal isn't worth posting any more; all the assumptions and business
cases are obsoleted.

Today, rather than use a client at all, I'd probably push for WebRTC P2P
support, funding patches in all the browsers and their mobile versions,
incentivize people to upgrade their browsers, host with cheap bandwidth for
everyone else, and just hold on until enough of the market has upgraded.

~~~
kzahel
I agree with you that WebRTC is the obvious choice when it becomes available.
It's simply too hard to get people to install a client. For users to install a
client, the uses for it must be compelling enough to go through the trouble of
installing an application. Dropbox is one example of how people will install
software because the product offers something useful enough.

It seems like live streaming client programs simply don't have the critical
mass of content available to force people to go to the trouble of installing
specialized software.

The web is going to be a very exciting place indeed, once the
webRTCPeerConnection.createDataChannel actually works and we can use
application logic to send arbitrary payloads to peers over the internet.

~~~
mtgx
Can someone create a WebRTC web app in this way, so one person can broadcast
to millions through P2P technology? Or would the browser vendors need to make
certain API's available before they can do that?

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kzahel
Once arbitrary data can be sent through peer connections via a browser
javascript application, then there is no reason why the BitTorrent Live
protocol (or some other similar P2P streaming protocol) could not work over
WebRTC.

One difficulty I see is actually getting the binary data into a <video>
element. It would be in theory possible to write to the file in the HTML5
FileSystem API and point the video element to it, but that would require
transmitting the stream in a way that is ameliorable to seeming like a static
video on disk.

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doublec
Possibly the MediaSource api, which allows writing to media elements:
[http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/media-
source/m...](http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/media-source/media-
source.html)

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Joeboy
Is this not the sort of thing IP multicast is for?

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wmf
IP multicast is turned off on the Internet.

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bvdbijl
Thank god... imagine the incredible noise

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sargun
What do you mean? The whole point of multicast is that you don't have noise.
You choose exactly what you want to get.

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KaoruAoiShiho
Can this be further developed to replace Facetime and Skype? /cross fingers.

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kzahel
Facetime and Skype and Hangouts are mostly for 1-1 communication or small
group communication. I think the aim for this is to enable anyone to a live
broadcast to as large an audience as they wish. Like justin.tv, or ustream

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eps
There is a 10 year old PeerCast that does (or was intended to do) something
very similar. The only difference, which is crucial, is that BT sits on a
massive userbase that they may be able to repurpose for bootstraping their
project... Though Skype was in a similar position and look how well their
Vienna Project is doing (it's dead).

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Nux
Where's the linux client? Where's the source for the client?

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runn1ng
if I get it right, BitTorrent live is a centralized server with a proprietary
(?) client?

I don't think that's the lesson to take from BitTorrent.

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kzahel
AFAIK, the centralized server is not a strict necessity in terms of the
functionality of the core protocol. It is more of a business decision to
require the central server to authorize the stream (I believe each stream has
a key that must be signed by the central server). This way, DMCA can be
respected and liability issues are less of a concern.

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404error
Stream Torrent works pretty well too.

<http://stream-torrent.en.softonic.com/>

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kzahel
windows only, and disclaimers about it being unsupported on that site.

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dysoco
I love the idea, I'd like to stream but I have about 256kb/s of upload speed
and using TwitchTV or so it's impossible.

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astro1138
I'm super excited by this but where are the specs?

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sopranno
streemig for freedom, long live the live-bittorrent.

