
BitTorrent News to Launch at Republican National Convention - hbcondo714
http://blog.bittorrent.com/2016/07/13/bittorrent-news-to-launch-at-republican-national-convention/
======
jswny
I think it would be really cool to have some type of audience participation
built into a system like this. One of the parts that I hate most about
watching the news is that I know I'm watching a singular viewpoint, and that
nobody else has a chance to provide commentary on the topic at hand.
Considering how much BitTorrent stressed that they wanted to provide a
independent coverage, I think that some type of viewer input would be
fantastic. It would help take watching the news into the interactive age.

~~~
rtkwe
Every example of a call in style audience interaction I've seen winds up being
dominated by 'pranks' or off topic ramblings.

------
sktrdie
I'm not sure what their (BitTorrent TM) business plan is. First of all you
have the problem of the name. The BitTorrent name is tainted with illegal
sharing activities, and has been so for the past decade. Then there's the
problem of monetizing something like this where you have other platforms like
YouTube that work quite well for streaming live video, and they're pretty much
free.

Also, can't download neither BitTorrent Live and News, and there's no source
code. How do these people make money and/or stay relevant?

I'm not claiming p2p live video streaming is an easy task, and in fact, it
seems to be an impossible task at this point, otherwise we'd see open source
projects that make p2p video streaming work, and we don't.

It seems to be more of a bandwidth problem, rather than a software/algorithm
problem: if the video isn't extremely relevant (lots of peers sharing it)
and/or the source peer doesn't have lots of bandwidth, then this will simply
not work.

~~~
hendzen
"Our main source of revenue is off the toolbars we push out, which isn't a
great source of monetization, but it's something. You can do the math on how
many installs we have and what the monetization of toolbars is, and subtract
out the costs of having 50 employees, and you'll get a reasonable ballpark of
how profitable we are, although the short answer is very. Even lousy
monetization works well when you have more users than Twitter." \- Bram Cohen

[0] - [https://www.quora.com/How-profitable-is-BitTorrent-
Inc](https://www.quora.com/How-profitable-is-BitTorrent-Inc)

------
spaceheeder
Might be interesting if they actually open-sourced the underlying Bittorrent
Live protocol, which they have explicitly stated they won't do Because Piracy.

------
fhood
Surprised that they choose apple as the first ecosystem to launch in.

------
jprince
Yeah, because I'm totally going to be interested in listening to a bunch of Al
Jazeera reporters try to do Al Jazeera America again. Totally unbiased
reporting, that. :P

~~~
tracker1
Al Jazeera America wasn't bad, and probably more even handed than most US news
sources... in-line with BBC America imho.

That said, most people prefer their news source biased to their own political
leanings.

