Video Breakthroughs

BitTorrent has just posted a call for broadcast engineers to help with the building of BitTorrent Live.

BitTorrent Live is a new peer-to-peer live streaming protocol. It allows content creators to scale their reach to audiences of millions with near-zero latencies and minimal infrastructure investment.

“Built with users, from scratch, it’s designed to take the principles of the BitTorrent protocol, and apply them to streaming,” according to BitTorrent’s call to broadcasters, “That means: no barriers to broadcast. That means: the more people who tune in, the more resilient your stream. That means: you can share video with a massive audience, in realtime – without bandwidth costs or infrastructure requirements.

Television is going the way of the dinosaur, and the deadly comet is called BitTorrent Live. Today, Bram Cohen, the author of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer sharing protocol, demoed his latest creation at the SF MusicTech Summit.

BitTorrent Live lets any content owner or publisher stream video to millions of people at good quality and with just a few seconds of latency…for free or cheap. Sports, news events, simulcast TV shows, education, video conferencing, or uncensored war zone broadcasts — this technology will power the future of video.

“My goal is to kill off television” Cohen said during the SF MusicTech demo session I hosted. Afterwards he explained to me in rhyme, “Television’s physical infrastructure is inevitably going to go away, but TV as a mode of content consumption is here to stay.” Essentially, people love what they see on television, but want it accessible from the web.