Friday, July 25, 2008

EU Peer to Peeer Video Experiment

The EU has a 19 million euro project to test the peer to peer delivery of video content. It is looking for thousands of people to install and use the Swarmplayer that uses BitTorrent technology. SwarmPlayer uses peer to peer to distribute video rather than centralized services as is commonly used today. You can get it by clicking here. It is currently offer a BBC broadcast and a live view of Amsterdam.

It will be interesting to see the results. I have been skeptical of peer to peer technology for delivery of TV quality content. SD takes about 2 Mbps today using MPEG-4, which is much high than most upstreams. It will be necessary to draw from several peers concurrently to make this work.

I have always wondered why a broadband user would want to dedicate a significant amount of upstream bandwidth so that somebody else can watch a TV program. I suppose if it is spread across enough other users the load will become negligible, but this assumes a relatively light level of usage.

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