Comcast will play nice with BitTorrent

Comcast and BitTorrent have announced some sort of collaboration, after Comcast has come under heavy fire for actively disrupting BitTorrent traffic. Comcast will continue to shape traffic, but apparently without singling out particular applications' traffic. BitTorrent will strive to be friendlier to ISPs' networks and their costs. The announcement is already making waves, both pro and con.

P2P streaming media from Velocix

Velocix, formerly CacheLogic, a British CDN, now offers video streaming services (both live and on-demand). Velocix services are provided by a hybrid CDN-P2P network; their P2P protocol is apparently based on BitTorrent.

March Madness live broadcast on Joost not a resounding success

Apparently , Joost's live broadcast of the March Madness basketball games ran into technical difficulties. The "regular" (?) streaming from CBS's site worked well.

Fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control

ZDNet has up a mildly technical note/article/review on fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control.

Internet TV subscriptions doubled in 2007

Internet TV subscriptions more than doubled in 2007, according to this report, to 12.3 million. France, China, and the US lead the adoption of Internet TV.

CBC to share show on BitTorrent

Canadian public television will distribute a very popular annual show, worldwide, DRM-free, via BitTorrent. News.com has some details and some P2P-evangelism on the topic.

Joost Network Architecture

Courtesy of Lev K.'s web-browsing, here is Joost's own high-level, eminently readable description of the Joost Network Architecture, and some of their corporate concerns arising from it. A clear and interesting presentation from last year's UK Network Operators' Forum.

Tribler to offer live TV through P2P?

Uri A. points out a blog post on Mininova announcing a closed beta test for new video streaming in BitTorrent-based Tribler. Details are somewhat on the light side, but a quick search of the Tribler site leads to some specifics for users.

BBC wants to build its own CDN

The Register reports that the BBC plans to bolster its iPlayer internet TV service with a network of distribution servers located inside British ISPs, creating a Content Distribution Network over Internet infrastructure (rather than over proprietary cable). This follows their earlier effort at P2P distribution of their content, and offers a different approach to decreasing their internet traffic costs, and making the service less of a burden for ISPs.

Joost goes live

In line with previous hints and rumours, Joost will start streaming live channels (rather than the VOD they do now), initially just to cover March Madness, and presumably to try out their systems.

Cisco will distribute GridNetworks' P2P TV client

Cisco has invested in GridNetworks, makers of the GridCasting hybrid CDN/P2P TV network, and will distribute their client in (millions of) their home networking devices, definitely an interesting connection.

The GridCasting client is freely downloadable, and I could watch some demo material, but couldn't actually find content providers who use it to distribute their media.

P2P + ISP = P4P

Verizon will work to speed up (some kinds of) P2P traffic, while saving money on that same traffic, according to several reports recently. Verizon is part of the P4P Working Group of ISPs and P2P makers, aimed at creating a technology with advantages for both ISPs and P2P users; apparently they are quite excited by recent results by researchers at Yale. The main goal appears to be to maximise P2P communications within the ISP's network, saving on the much greater costs of inter-ISP communications.

There's some high-level verbiage on P4P publicly available already, and Pando (recently mentioned as working with NBC for their P2P TV offering) are evidently involved.

NBC's take on P2P: yes and no

An interesting interview with two bigwigs from NBC: worried by illegal P2P downloads of their copyrighted material, and eager to further their own Internet TV initiatives (e.g. Hulu), most recently by deciding to offer "NBC Direct" with Pando's P2P technology.

YouTube becomes a service

Slashdot links 2 reports on YouTube releasing an API (e.g. to integrate in your website) and on TiVo offering YouTube content

Pay-TV and the American Consumer

Long-time reader Talia K. points out ABI Research's recent survey, Pay-TV and the American Consumer. You need to register to download the whole thing in PDF; inside is a fairly interesting profile of US consumers, centred around what TV-related technology they have, what they would pay for, and so on.

P2P-Next: EU-funded research into P2P TV

The EU (and the BBC) are funding research into P2P-Next, a BitTorrent-based system which aims to become a standard (and open) means for distributing on-demand and live streaming content. The available details are pretty thin. There was some discussion of this recently (e.g. here), following the large EU grant.

BBC's iPlayer

The BBC lets Brits watch their television show through iPlayer, a name which apparently covers both a P2P desktop application and a Flash-based streaming video website thingy. There's a whole list of pieces on this in The Register, for example.

ISPs actively attack P2P applications

Earlier this year, there were several revelations regarding Comcast's practices intended to limit BitTorrent users.

Ars Technica's piece on the FCC investigating Comcast for this behaviour is a good place to start reading.

Some internet TV efforts to check out

For an idea of the current status of internet TV efforts, these are 4 interesting leaders to look at.

Joost: a VOD application (+ some widgets) with many channels, in open beta, from the founders of Skype, with a pretty cool UI

Babelgum: another VOD application, also in open beta, also with slick UI

Neokast: live streaming in a web-browser plugin, with a simple interface to easily start broadcasting from a webcam; claims to be a P2P network

Livestation: live streaming application, which also claims to be a P2P network; currently in closed technical trial (but I have a few invitations to send out), and broadcasting a small selection of news channels (from conventional TV networks); pretty basic UI


I haven't listed youtube and the like, as these are too obvious, and a bit wide of the "Internet TV" experience.