Fabchannel experiments with BitTorrent-powered concerts
Written by Ernesto on November 16, 2006Fabchannel has successfully completed an experiment in which they used BitTorrent to stream a live concert. Fabchannel is an award winning music site where you can watch videos of live concerts.
Earlier this year Fabchannel won a Webby Award for best music site. They are still adding new features to the site to make it even better. The BitTorrent-powered streaming experiment is a good example of this. Using BitTorrent to stream live concert feeds will dramatically decrease the costs of such a service, because everybody who watches the show will contribute a certain amount of bandwidth.
“If this new technology works well, Fabchannel will not need more expensive datacenters, streaming servers and huge amounts of bandwidth to distribute live webcasts to the fast growing number of Fabchannel visitors from around the world,” says Bauke on the Fabchannel Blog.
Fabchannel used the Tribler BitTorrent client for the experiment. The Tribler team is planning to implement BitTorrent powered streaming service in their client, which could save popular streaming websites like YouTube or Google Video a lot of money. Johan Pouwelse, co-ordinator of the Tribler project told TorrentFreak that they are currently experimenting with “peer assisted” YouTube videos.
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Interesting.
Being able to share files that are not yet completed does have potential use in the bittorrent world, not only for streaming video or audio.
For example, individuals on the east coast who capture popular HDTV shows and encode them in XviD/x264 formats could potentially start sharing these files as soon as the encoding starts (on the fly). This would be a much more efficient way to distribute these shows among top sites, which would also mean a much quicker public release.
However, this seems like a major change from the bittorrent protocol, considering bittorrent is mainly based on the analysis of an entire file or files, doing a hash check, and splitting this up into smaller pieces to distribute.
This brings up the question of error checking with “streaming” data. Since there is no torrent which contains hash data to error check pieces, I wonder how the integrity of the data would be preserved?
Anyways.. just ramblings of an uniformed clown…
Here is some info on “tribler streaming”:
http://www.tribler.org/test_streaming/index.php?n=Site.Algorithm
http://tribler.org/test_streaming/pub/tribler_streaming_explained.pdf
btw, Ernesto, when are we going to get a good article covering the HR HDTV scene from you!? Keep up the good work.
Wow thats a really nice website. I love it. Nice one TorrentFreak :D
Hi all!
I found a music concert site which is pretty cool: YouSwitch.tv
You can look at four video streams simultaneously with 4 different camera angles during a live show. You just have to choose the stream you want to watch. (if you want to see the drummer, the guitarist during a solo…) The nice thing is, switching allows you also to create a mixture of individual streams, and thus, you build your own montage of the pre-recorded concert and keep it. It seems that they are only in the beta testing version of the site and the final design will be available soon with more exclusive artist performances. It’ll be cool to direct your favourite band concert footage, you don’t need to have a production truck.
Cheers
http://www.youswitch.tv
Al.
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