Turn Your Computer into a TV Station
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that some students at U. of Texas-Austin have developed software allowing people to stream shows off of their computers:
The software, called Alluvium, uses peer-to-peer technology to let people stream video to multiple users nonstop—even without high-speed Internet connections. It’s not just for tech enthusiasts and struggling artists, says Joseph T. Lopez, a graduate student who co-founded the software project.
The program specializes in “swarmcasting,” says Mr. Lopez. Much like BitTorrent, the file-swapping program popular with movie downloaders, the swarmcasting program breaks video files into small pieces, so that a computer user can download component parts simultaneously from any other machines that are storing or streaming the files.
But unlike BitTorrent, Alluvium—which was designed by Brandon Wiley, also a graduate student at Austin—orders those component parts before downloading them. Users of the software can simulate the experience of watching live TV, by streaming video as they finish downloading it.
The idea here is that because the focus is on streaming video rather than downloading it, they will be able to avoid the copyright infringement pitfalls that have befallen other p2p networks. Unfortunately for them, this very technical argument will be lost on the copyright regime enforcers.
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Good point on Alluvium, a competitor to BitTorrent....Tracked on: Firefox (82.165.239.114) at 2005 06 28 00:02:24
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