
Puffer – Stream live TV in the browser - rowdyranga
http://puffer.stanford.edu
======
aiddun
> What channels can I watch? Puffer re-transmits free over-the-air broadcast
> television signals received by an antenna located on the campus of Stanford
> University.

Is this legal? Aereo [0] had to shut down because broadcasters sued them for
streaming OTA TV signals, which went all the way to the Supreme Court where
they lost. Aereo even had an antennae per customer.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo)

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Is this legal?

If it's not for profit and geoconstrained, yes.

[https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/nonprofit-launches-
ny...](https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/nonprofit-launches-ny-tv-
station-streaming-service-171031)

[https://www.locast.org/](https://www.locast.org/)

~~~
chacha2
It's 'geoconstrained' by just giving you a tick box that says you're in
America. I wish all geoconstraits were that lazy.

~~~
T1glober
Incidentally, crypto exchanges in the past (and one very recently, known as
Bitmex) have faced issues with US authorities regarding this. Context: US
citizens cannot trade unless the exchange is US-licensed.

Essentially, US gov applied pressure such that a simple tick box (to prove you
are not American) is not sufficient. So, authorities definitely have precedent
to enforce geo-constraints, it's just a matter of "do they care".

~~~
jrockway
I'm guessing that these broadcasters will be happy to go from 0 to 500
viewers. YouTube hasn't killed them quite yet!

------
dangom
> For the research project to work, we need some source of video that never
> ends and is sufficiently interesting to attract a few hundred people to
> watch. Broadcast TV is the most interesting thing that we have access to and
> are permitted to retransmit.

The most interesting thing about this experiment is that the most interesting
thing that a research group at a top tier University finds to retransmit are
Broadcast TV channels.

------
tonyaiken
The project has been funded in part by the NSF and DARPA, along with support
from Google, Huawei, VMware, Dropbox, Facebook, and the Stanford Platform Lab.

------
PaulRobinson
I'm an ex-CTO of Livestation, which was a profit-making firm doing OTT TV.

Short version: news channels are so keen to get soft power projection, they'll
pay _you_ to carry them.

That was started as a validation to prove peer to peer Silverlight was the
future. As you can tell from looking around you today, that didn't work: it
ended up being a pretty standard HLS/HDS stack. Eventually it pivoted to UGC
live-streaming and became an app called Busker before dying out.

This stuff is harder than it looks, but there is a massive, massive market for
it if you can find a way to make the numbers work.

As a research project this looks nifty, but be aware: GeoIP DBs are awful for
geofencing particularly on US/Canada.

------
pietroglyph
The most interesting part about this (which they don't mention on the
homepage) is that they are collecting data which they use to retrain a neural
neural network that predicts transmission time. This neural network and a
predictive model are paired to do things like adaptive bitrate selection and
congestion control. They even retrain the model every day based on the past
day's data.

This approach apparently performs better than using just a predictive model or
just a neural network without any explicit model at all.

They also say they plan to open this up to other research and that they will
continue running the site for a couple of years.

------
aphroz
Unrelated to this technically amazing solution: i have seen no content except
ads. It looks like there is more ads than content, no wonder than people stop
watching tv.

~~~
Itsdijital
Occasionally at some friends house we'll watch TV. I don't know how the hell
they bear it. It seems to have gone to a 5 minutes of TV, 5 minutes of ads
model.

And to think they are paying $120 a month for that...

------
cschmittiey
Wow, I'm pretty impressed! Switching streams was nearly instant and seems to
come in at a good quality.

Kudos to whoever's making this happen, I'd love to see this kind of speed come
to both commercial services and services like Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin

------
mario_lopez
> During the Study, no more than 500 participants may access the Website at
> any time.

> Your participation will take approximately six to nine months. We expect
> each participant to stream video from the Website for several hours each
> week. We reserve the right to terminate your participation if you do not
> meet the expectation described above, or otherwise violate these Terms of
> Participation or any applicable laws.

Neat stuff in the ToS, wonder how strict they are on following these
regulations

~~~
misingnoglic
Not at all lol

------
roywiggins
A service, Locast, is available in a few cities. It's geo-locked, though.

[https://www.locast.org/](https://www.locast.org/)

~~~
jedberg
It’s geolocation is 100% reliant on what the user’s mechine reports as it’s
location...

------
fomopop
We wrote an article on them earlier this year if you want to learn more:
[https://thestreamable.com/news/exclusive-stanford-
researcher...](https://thestreamable.com/news/exclusive-stanford-researchers-
launch-free-streaming-service-to-improve-video-streaming-algorithms)

------
benbristow
"I confirm that I live in the US"

...sure I do

~~~
taobility
Same as I confirm I am over 18, isn't it?

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reaperducer
Does KQED air any tech-related shows? It would be fun if a bunch of HN-folk
watched at the same time and had a running comment thread on here.

------
saluki
Wow, this could be nice this fall for football.

------
antpls
Just tried. I'm on 4G and the lives were HD without buffering, so if any new
algo is enabled right now, it seems to work well.

Would it be possible to be able to manually set the resolution of the videos ?
Full HD will burn my 4G quota

------
KiDD
I've been really enjoying Puffer since I first saw it posted here to HN

------
oblib
I'm in their target market. No broadcast TV available where I live.

The stream works for a few seconds after clicking a channel but then freeze on
all the channels.. The sound continued to work on all the channels though.

I suspect this may have something to do with with it being designed for
testing with 500 users, number of HN users here clicking the link.

I'll try again later after things settle down.

Debug Info:

Video playback buffer (s): 14.6 Video resolution: 1920x1080 Video encoding
setting (CRF): 22 Video quality (SSIM dB): 17.49 Video bitrate (kbps): 6210.93

------
paulcarroty
[http://www.radio-browser.info/](http://www.radio-browser.info/) designed as
public radio DB, bus has a lot TV channels.

------
wybiral
Bob Ross is the only thing good on right now but I do have to say that while
the quality isn't the best the stream performance is really nice and stable.
Works great.

------
jajool
The FAQ page is very well written.

------
dilly_li
Wonder how long would this last! Also it would be nice to have
Roku/Chromecast/youtube live/facebook live extension.

~~~
jersully72
I love the simplicity of it and would LOVE to have this on Roku.

------
psim1
Watching a rodeo on CBS right now, I see the video bitrate ranging from around
500kbps to over 20 Mbps. The bitrate does not seem to correlate with anything
visible to me, such as the amount of motion in the picture or the video
quality.

~~~
KeithBrink
Apparently Puffer is actually a study that is testing streaming algorithms:

[https://puffer.stanford.edu/terms/](https://puffer.stanford.edu/terms/)

------
wingworks
Anyone else getting "WebSocket connection to
'wss://puffer.stanford.edu:50021/' failed: Error in connection establishment:
net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED" ?

It was working fine about an hour ago.

------
m1sta_
Based on the last 10 minutes, this works soooo much better than twitch.

~~~
Itsdijital
Twitch is a train wreck of a site. I'm baffled about how amazon lets it run
like that. It's not like they don't have the resources to fix it.

------
misingnoglic
This is what I use to watch The Bachelorette every week without paying
$40/month for YT TV. Thanks Stanford!

The GitHub is also very interesting - pretty good code for an academic
website.

------
hising
My first question clicking on this, looking at the url, is "Wonder what they
are studying here?".

~~~
wybiral
Adaptive stream encoding:
[https://puffer.stanford.edu/static/puffer/documents/puffer-a...](https://puffer.stanford.edu/static/puffer/documents/puffer-
arxiv.pdf)

~~~
hising
Awesome, thanks for the link, however my mind was more "this sounds to good to
be true, I bet they are studying something else" :)

------
haunter
Works from Europe. Too good to be true. Guess will be regionlocked or taken
down soon.

------
chnsh
The FAQs are well written

------
futhey
I ported this to the Fire TV (Chromium) – took about 10 minutes.

------
TwoNineA
"Research project" ... of course.

Let's take bets how long before it's gone.

~~~
reaperducer
You seem to forget another little Stanford research project called "Google."

