BitTorrent Live Hopes to Capture Digital Broadcast Market

BitTorrent has taken the wraps off of BitTorrent Live, a live streaming service in beta designed to establish a direct connection between amateur broadcasters and their viewers. It said that the technology transforms each person tuning in into "a miniature broadcaster."

The platform relies on the same peer-to-peer technology BitTorrent is known for in terms of file sharing. For the past three years however, company founder Bram Cohen has been working on a way to serve video in an IP broadcast environment more efficiently, according to TechCrunch.

Of course, Ustream, YouTube and others are already working on cracking the digital online broadcast nut at scale, but Cohen is banking on the peer-to-peer architecture to provide a differentiator. After installing a browser plug-in, video delay averages less than five seconds, the company said.

BitTorrent is also planning to use the technology to swim upstream, targeting TV stations and other large corporations looking for more cost-efficient ways to deliver high-scale digital video.

Cohen demonstrated the technology at the SF MusicTech Summit. "My goal is to kill off television," Cohen said, telling TechCrunch that "Television's physical infrastructure is inevitably going to go away, but TV as a mode of content consumption is here to stay."

Source: RapidTV News

BitTorrent to Start Testing Live P2P

BitTorrent has just posted a call for broadcast engineers to help with the building of BitTorrent Live. BitTorrent Live has been testing for some time and now they call for broadcasters to join them in these tests.

BitTorrent Live is a new peer-to-peer live streaming protocol. It allows content creators to scale their reach to audiences of millions with near-zero latencies and minimal infrastructure investment.

“Built with users, from scratch, it’s designed to take the principles of the BitTorrent protocol, and apply them to streaming,” according to BitTorrent’s call to broadcasters, “That means: no barriers to broadcast. That means: the more people who tune in, the more resilient your stream. That means: you can share video with a massive audience, in realtime – without bandwidth costs or infrastructure requirements.

“We’ve been conducting regular tests with users (props to our intrepid volunteers), and have achieved results at swarm sizes of a few thousand. Now, we’re inviting qualified broadcasters like you to help us build something amazing.”

Leveraging the lessons of the original BitTorrent protocol, BitTorrent Live has been designed from scratch as the perfect means of sharing events to the masses in real-time, but without the astronomical bandwidth requirements that traditionally constrain content creators.

Every viewer that joins a swarm extends its reach by sharing pieces of the video to other viewers. Media is delivered with stunningly low delay by utilizing a UDP Screamer protocol. Video and audio are transmitted using the industry standard H.264 and AAC codecs, providing the highest quality.

On the company’s website it says: “BitTorrent Live is still under heavy development, and as such, is available as a technology demonstration only. The ability to run a video source is not currently available to end-users. Once the protocol has been finalised we expect to allow user generation of content. The experience may not be perfect yet, but we strive daily to improve it, and welcome your input and experiences. “

By Robert Briel, Broadband TV News

BitTorrent Expands Live Streaming Tests

BitTorrent has quietly been testing its upcoming live streaming platform, and now the company is ready to take the next step with a new round of scalability tests that could include the live streaming of indie concerts. A new BitTorrent Live website built with these kinds of tests in mind launched a few days ago, but a company spokesperson cautioned that “a broad beta is still a couple of months away.”

BitTorrent has been testing its live streaming platform with a limited number of users at a no-frills website that hasn’t been publicized but has nonetheless been publicly accessible for some time at live.bittorrent.com. At the end of last week, the site suddenly received a significant face-lift, complete with installation instructions for the BitTorrent Live software and a brief explanation that reads:

"BitTorrent Live is a whole new P2P protocol to distribute live streamed data across the internet without the need for infrastructure, and with a minimum of latency."

Users can download BitTorrent live clients for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. The client simply works in the background to facilitate data transfer and doesn’t allow any configuration. Video streams display in the browser via Flash, and a Facebook plug-in allows users to chat with one another while watching a stream. An additional tab offers access to the audio and video bitrate and other debug data.

Speaking of video: BitTorrent’s spokesperson told me that the tests have so far been restricted to “simple pre-recorded content loops to test latency and audio/visual sync.” I was able at one time to tap into a prerecorded stream of a winter sports event but at other times simply didn’t get to see anything.

However, those P2P live streaming tests could get a lot more exciting soon: “One of the ideas is to invite a few of our favorite indie artists into our office to broadcast content and help us kick the tires with their fans,” said BitTorrent’s spokesperson. Still, don’t expect BitTorrent to stream Coachella anytime soon. I was told that “the redesign isn’t intended to suggest we’re out of the R&D stage of designing, building and testing the product.”

BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen has worked on the live streaming platform for close to three years, and he told me at NewTeeVee Live last year that his efforts included writing a complete new P2P protocol from scratch. The BitTorrent protocol itself, he said, simply introduced too much latency to be a viable live streaming solution.

By Janko Roettgers, GigaOM

Bram Cohen: BitTorrent Protocol & Live Streaming Don’t Mix

BitTorrent mastermind Bram Cohen knows the strengths and weaknesses of the P2P protocol he invented more than eight years ago, and he’s not ashamed to point out one particular downside: BitTorrent is the wrong approach for live streaming.

During an interview at NewTeeVee Live recently, he explained to me that BitTorrent just has too much latency to be viable for such applications. “Just the fact that it’s using TCP makes that completely impossible,” he said.

Watch the entire interview here:

Cohen has been working on his own live streaming solution for the last two years, and he said it has only recently become close to releasable. His new approach to P2P live streaming is being developed as a product of BitTorrent Inc., but the company has so far kept mum about what the product will eventually look like.

However, Cohen hinted at the possibility that BitTorrent will compete with live streaming sites like Ustream and Justin.tv. Asked whether this technology is for networks like ABC or a guy in his basement, he said: “ABC can afford to pay for whatever they want to do right now.”

Users just starting out, on the other hand, often don’t have the infrastructure available to deal with possibly overnight success. “Peer to peer is really a democratizing technology,” he said.

By Janko Roettgers, GigaOM