Bittorrent launches BitTorrent Live beta, its peer-to-peer streaming ...

The beta version of the long-awaired BitTorrent Live -- the peer-to-peer video streaming service from the BitTorrent team -- is now open for people who want to sign up and try it out.

Under development for three years, it resolves a longstanding issue -- how to use the power of torrenting, where a file gets easier to download the more people who request it, to reduce the infrastructure requirements for video streaming. BitTorrent Live allows anyone with a webcam and an internet connection to (theoretically) stream to an unlimited number of viewers, with issues such as buffering reducing, not increasing, as more viewers log on.

Peer-to-peer downloads normally work by splitting files up into individual bits and downloading them piecemeal as they become available, both from the original "seed" source and other people who have already downloaded that bit. That innovation made downloading on the web a lot easier, and today a significant proportion of the internet's total traffic in the form of torrents -- a report last year by Canadian analyst firm Sandvine found that torrents made up roughly between ten and 15 percent of all internet traffic in the US and Europe.

If someone wants to set up their own YouTube-style service, this technology makes that a lot easier to do -- they won't have to shell out nearly as much on server capacity. The service is being pitched to large broadcasters (both offline and on the web) who want to reduce the costs associated with streaming their content online, but it's also exciting for individuals, like protesters, who need to get a message out to as many people as possible.

In short, it's a major threat to established small-scale web broadcasters like Ustream which haven't yet cracked the peer-to-peer video streaming problem and instead still rely on centralised servers for users to bounce their broadcasts off. It's also going to be a mighty interesting prospect for a company like Netflix, whose services constitute a whopping 28.8 percent of all US internet traffic, according to Sandvine.

Decentralised filesharing also made piracy hugely more efficient, of course, and BitTorrent Live technology will also be tempting to those who run the tens of thousands of illegal streams of TV broadcasts (particularly sport) that now populate the web.

However, while there should be some streams up for you to see now (such as this San Francisco traffic camera), we've been mostly met with error messages so far when trying to load them up. That's the downside -- if you're not attracting viewers, you might put those few you have off with slow, buffering videos. We'll have to wait and see how the service develops to cope with that issue.

Image: Shutterstock

Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-03/13/bittorrent-video-streaming-launched

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