Imagine a video player, with the capability to suck streaming video from your peers, connected to all the broadcasters of the world. Broadcasters will not need to have huge fat connections as feeds will, after the initial seed is planted in a peer, be fed peer to peer without needing any more service from the broadcaster itself. Stuff of nerd utopia?
Well, this is now reality. TVUnetworks is offering such a player, in beta, for free. How he handles the legality, I don't know. It seems to be legal. He is open to the world, even his address is available. The World Cup was rebroadcasted to tens of thousands using this technology.
What does this mean? The quality is excellent, with a 100kB/s total feed from 15 peers, we have better than Starhub SD quality. Do cable operators have to move up to HD totally just to escape TVUnetworks and its brethen? Even then, there is no theoretical limit to the delivery capability of peer-to-peer streaming. Even 6Mbit/s HD can be delivered now if the upstream datarate in a region is good. With Docsis 3 bonding, wow, we'll have even less limits.
What is sure, is that Slingbox is dead. TVUplayer does not need any configuration, any hardware, etc. Any broadcaster wanting to go it alone, like Mediacorp's Mobtv.sg better review their business plan, perhaps to work with TUVnetworks, solving all their bandwidth issues.
Incredible stuff. I'll keep you guys posted. Now for HBO on TVUplayer.
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More than ten years ago, a Canadian startup, called icravetv, wanted to rebroadcast free-to-air channels viewable within Canada, to persons on the Internet. The U.S. media companies shut it down, even after icravetv said they would seek to ensure that persons within the U.S. cannot access the service. The main bone of contention was ad revenue. Of course the media companies should have sought to meter the usage of icravetv and then use that in computing ad rates, but that's not what they chose to do. TVUplayer may meet the same obstacle.
I think the licensing needs a lot of creativity. But right now, nothing much is known, so I'll just watch.
Starhub will surely respond. The press will probably pick it up next week or so.
there's the carrot, the pcube and the other donkey
And there's our courts, contractual misrepresentation by an ISP, and the fact that more and more instances of P2P used for legal purposes.
Well its been a long time and still nothing on this sweet program. I don't see that computing the usage is any harder than doing it for regular tv. In fact its easier. Tv people are just unable to come to grips with the idea of providing the widest possible choice of content the viewers. The loser in this equation would actually be the cable and satelite companies. I have considered cancelling my subscription to cable more frequently what with TVU and bittorrent. Probably or possibly the cable companies will just start selling a data pipeline that will include just a non-specific flow of data. For phone-calls video in/out or whatever. Theyll make out ok and the content providers will too.
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