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