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back to article BitTorrent opens kimono, gets out one-to-many streaming tool

BitTorrent’s live streaming protocol has finally emerged into the daylight after years of development. The beta program is now public. You can try it. The broadcast data is assigned to small groups - "clubs" - which then share the stream with a UDP protocol. Congestion control is added at the last hop. There’s more detail in …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not new

    Acestream (Stream torrent) has being doing this for a bit now.

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  2. Daniel B.
    Boffin

    BT Multicast!

    So basically, it's the BitTorrent way of doing multicast. Hope it works behind NAT, given the ISPs out there trying to force that awful thing upon end-users...

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    1. Alan Brown Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: BT Multicast!

      Except multicast usually doesn't work because most ISPs refuse to support it.

      This appears a reasonable compromise regarding ISP pigheadedness.

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  3. mANgLEr

    Sopcast seems to do it adequately as well.

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  4. Crisp

    Looks like everyone will have the potential to be famous for fifteen minutes

    I wonder what they will become famous for...

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  5. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Boffin

    In other words, it's a torrent

    The file is just passed between peers in sequential order instead of random order so it can be displayed when it's received.

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  6. bag o' spanners
    Devil

    Just guessing, but I think it will be a useful tool for those underground pirate radio types who resent intrusion and extortion by the RIAA and BFI. I can also see a few niche content providers using it to avoid censorious blocking.

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    1. Crisp
      Reply Icon

      Re: niche content

      Fnar Fnar!

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  7. bill 36
    Thumb Down

    Can't get it to work

    Not on XP pro anyway.

    maybe its been built for Windoze 8 of course :>)

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Oddly I think "broadcasting" (as in through the air)...

      I don' t think it's odd at all; broadcasting is lightyears ahead of the Internet for "live" TV.

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  9. JeffyPooh
    Pint

    What ever happened to multicast?

    Giving up on Multicast are we?

    .:confused:.

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    1. Jamie Jones Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Trollface

      Re: What ever happened to multicast?

      RTFA !!

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    2. h3
      Reply Icon

      Re: What ever happened to multicast?

      People seem to be trying everything possible to not use ipv6 (Where multicast just works unless it is specifically and deliberately broken).

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  10. HarshKarma
    Pirate

    Expect to see BitTorrent (Live) pirates streaming freeview/sky across the internet before long...

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  11. Mick H
    Thumb Up

    Well it works

    Just tried it with windows 7 using firefox. Works very nicely, now BBC take lessons and fix iPlayer =)

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  12. MrXavia
    Thumb Up

    Great, BUT I can see the networks not being happy... suddenly they are getting a lot more upstream traffic than they are used to.. and with the new 300/30 connections over fiber. that might be A LOT of data!

    Expect it to be traffic managed unless some big name takes off with it...

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    1. Grave
      Reply Icon

      i'm sure big media will be happy, after all you will be paying for the privilege to watch paid content. (you will have to pay for and with your bandwidth over which they spread their content, for which you have to pay of course. moving the expense of streaming content onto the customers, and savings into big media coffers).

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    2. roselan
      Reply Icon
      Pint

      I did not dive into details yet, but if it follows ip usual hoops routing, ISP will be happy.

      If a bunch of end users get their stream from a mini-broadcaster inside an ISP network, and not from the original source outside it, the isp will pay less for interconnection.

      But of course, if the thing works so well that the total traffic explodes x10, we may feel it on our monthly invoice.

      I wonder how the protocol works with "pause" and peer disconnections. Buffers management must be fun :) I have to read the real thing (damn customer stupidwall).

      beer coz it's time!

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  13. Jeff Power

    Sounds a fair bit like Joost.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost

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