If we have to believe the reviews the film is worth watching.

“A high-concept, brave-new-world sci-fi puzzle… echoes futuristic thrillers such as 12 Monkeys and Children of Men… an atmosphere of mounting paranoia that’s grim and chilling,” Loren King of the Boston Globe wrote.

“Zenith [is] at top of its game,” said the Boston Herald.

As with every VODO release, the film can be downloaded for free, powered by BitTorrent. In addition to the familiar .torrent downloads Firefox users can also stream the film directly via the BitTorrent powered Swarmplayer plugin.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Wikipedia (and indeed the whole Wikimedia Foundation) just announced that it has started to use BitTorrent to stream its videos. The foundation is using Swarmplayer from P2P-Next to try and cut down on bandwidth costs.

The Wikimedia Foundation is concerned about bandwidth costs, as video becomes more prevalent on their various project sites (like News, and Quotes and the more famous Wikipedia project). In an announcement this week the foundation stated: “Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships.”

The system set up by Wikipedia uses a combination of webseeds and BitTorrent peers to spread the load. High priority pieces (like the start of the video) are pulled via more traditional HTTP sources, while later in the video where the data is of a lower priority it comes via the BitTorrent protocol. The process is described by P2Pnext in the following diagram;

“I think it’s important as a technology and something that needs exploring,” Michael Dale, Kaltura Open Media Developer and Wikimedia admin told TorrentFreak. The 6000-or-so videos on the Wikimedia servers are all set to use the technology, as will any new ones that are added.

Currently, Swarmplayer is only available as a plugin for Firefox (3.x, it doesn’t work well with the version 4 betas). An Internet Explorer plug-in will be available within the next day or two and a Chrome plugin is planned as well, we are assured. Not so good news for the Opera and Safari users though, as there is no plugin currently planned for them. However, people are free to create their own as the code is open source. “We’re just counting on one hardcore Opera user to port it to Opera,” Dr Pouwelse of P2P-Next told TorrentFreak.

“This is another step in strengthening Web TV,” Pouwelse continued. “The long-term goal is to offer more choice, provide higher quality and increased reliability compared to traditional TV technology.”

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For that experiment the stream was only broadcasted to a select group of people and not the entire Internet. Today, however, the lab’s researchers will launch their second BitTorrent streaming experiment on a much bigger scale, as they will broadcast a live stream of a live music performance for all the world to see.

“The setup is very simple at the cinema – we have a standard computer connected to audio and video mixers, which then feeds the P2P network,” Dr. Njål Borch, a senior researcher involved in the project told TorrentFreak.

The software they use to stream the performance is from the EU-funded P2P-Next project and several of the partners are also donating bandwidth for the experiment to make sure that everything runs smoothly.

The performance will take place at Aurora Kino in Tromsø as a part of the Insomnia electronic music festival. To spice things up, the lab is also sending a live feed to the Notch festival in Beijing, which is running in parallel with Insomnia, and to Skjervøy kulturhus in the far north of Norway.

However, since the broadcast is public this time, everyone with an Internet connection can tune in. The only thing required to watch the stream is the Swarmplayer software, or a browser plugin (Windows only). Both are linked on the project’s website.

According to Borch, this BitTorrent live streaming experiment is not just a proof of concept, it might eventually play a significant role in the future of live streaming on the Internet.

“If the scalability is good for live streaming, this can increase the amount of viewers without massive bandwidth bills. Another effect, which I am currently very much a fan of, is that adding more bandwidth is very easy – put up a seedbox and hand it the torrent. No administration otherwise necessary,” he told TorrentFreak.

Anyone who would like to be part of this world premiere can tune in at 5 pm CET when the broadcast will start. If all goes well you’ll be able to see a live performance of a new soundtrack to Pudovkin’s 1926 film, “Mother”.

Update: The broadcast ended and it’s replaced by a 5 minute clip of the concert so people can still test the streaming technology. It was a great success with visitors from all over the world.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Swarmplayer EZTV is experimenting with uses slightly modified torrent files (.tstream), which make it possible to stream video files using the BitTorrent protocol. This new technology allows publishers to offer video steams without having to pay for expensive bandwidth. Theoretically, you can watch all torrent files with the player but it’s recommended to use newer releases, as they often offer a higher swarm speed. Streaming the typical TV show will run to around 100kb/sec, a speed unattainable with their older television torrents due in part to the low peer numbers, as much as the larger piece size used in the pre-stream torrents.

Novaking isn’t too worried about the sequential piece transfer, and loss of the tit-for-tat impacting the speeds of the swarm for those not trying to stream. “The spread will be so wide in the first week,” he tells us, “that it won’t affect it greatly. Of course it’s impossible to tell until it’s fully live and working.” Currently, only their own torrents will be available via .tstream files, but the hope is that should the test prove successful during the next week, to have them for the torrents from their partner sites, such as MVgroup as well.

BitTorrent streaming is the ideal low-cost distribution model for online video. Here at TorrentFreak we have been testing out the Swarmplayer since its very early beta days with Mininova, and it does look to be a very promising development. However, the client does not (yet) have an option to keep a fully saved copy of the file on your system for later re-watching, and it also doesn’t allow you to change the port it uses. But these are minor issues that should be solved easily.

It is interesting to see that this multi-million dollar research project collaborates with torrent sites like Mininova, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC. Could this be the future of television? It is at least a possibility, and something for major networks to look at, as some already are (the BBC is a member of the group behind P2PNext, for example). EZTV’s Novaking certainly seems to think so. “We are hoping that TV networks start seeing this as a method to provide people with what they want”.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.