I enjoy quality journalism from international news channels like BBC World, Al-Jazeera and France24, but as I don’t own a TV (and probably never will) my only option is to use video streams from broadcasters or commercial third parties, and as unicast streams consume a lot of bandwidth for each concurrent user, they are not an affordable service for broadcasters to provide en masse. Usually, I’ll have to pay for the access, and I gladly do as long as the price is right.

Unfortunately, this is not a suitable solution if online TV streaming (where expensive ISP-dependent “value added” services like Nextgentel’s Broadpark just doesn’t cut it) are supposed to go mainstream. For a while now, I have been looking at different technologies for using peer-to-peer technology for distributing live multimedia streams as an alternative to unicast. There seems to be several services available online, depending on what you’d like to watch and if you don’t mind poor quality. One P2P service offer limited reception of Scandinavian entertainment channels like TV3, as well as NRK, TVNorge and others, probably without any consideration of copyright infringement. Besides this, the problem with solutions like this is also that the P2P distribution technology seem to be proprietary and poorly implemented with heavy dependencies on lock-in technology like Windows, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and ActiveX plugins.

Multicast transport might have been a good solution, but access to the MBone is usually not available outside academia, and IPv6 is just too far away.

Peer to peer distribution of live content is a complicated matter, and I have still not found a suitable open platform for P2P distribution of livestream content, so I am considering looking a bit deeper into current P2P protocols together with others. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

When I discussed this matter with a friend recently, she mentioned a service called Zattoo which seem to provide live content like Al-Jazeera, France24, Deutsche Welle and NRK in an acceptable quality for free. It is proprietary technology, and they seem to “only” use p2p to reduce the broadcaster’s bandwith demands to 10% of today. Not exactly what I was looking for in the technology itself, but it seems to be a cool service providing my favourite content free of charge. Much to my surprise, they also support a Linux client.