The MPAA has previously been critical of the negative effect it says BitTorrent has on the movie industry, but a recent experiment in a Norwegian movie theater shows that it might actually be of use to them. Researchers from The Far North Living Lab managed to stream a full 2K resolution film at 19mbit/s – with BitTorrent of course.
BitTorrent is already an important tool for millions of people who prefer their television on-demand, but integration with traditional TV-sets is still lacking. This is about to change though, as the Tribler team announces version 5 of its next generation BitTorrent client.
The Tribler BitTorrent client, a project run by researchers from several European universities and Harvard, is the first to incorporate decentralized search capabilities. With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralized site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova.
The Swarmplayer developed by the P2P-Next research group is now capable of streaming live video in true 4th generation P2P style using a zero-server approach. With a $22 million project budget from the EU and partners, the P2P-Next research group intends to redefine how video is viewed on the Internet.
A few weeks ago we reported that the EU Greens launched a pro-filesharing campaign named “I Wouldn’t Steal”. In a continued effort to support the development of P2P technology, the European Union has now invested $22 million in the development of an open-source BitTorrent client.
P2P researchers are working with the Harvard mechanism design group on implementing the “Nobel prize winning” mechanism design theory into their BitTorrent client. The ultimate goal is to keep people sharing as much as possible without imposing share ratio sanctions.
Harvard researchers have teamed up with the Tribler team to work on a P2P client with BitTorrent support that uses bandwidth as a global currency. They released Tribler V4.1 yesterday.