If you never heard of Bit Torrent you can stop reading this post. Now if you have or if you use it then go on to read about VidTorrent. As you know Bit Torrent is an incredibly clever way to download huge files. When I started Fon I was partly inspired by Bit Torrent because in Bit Torrent to download you must contribute to others downloading and at Fon to receive wifi signal you must contribute to others receiving your signal as well. Now after Bit Torrent comes VidTorrent, developed by brilliant MIT student Dimitris Vyzovitis. Now here´s a warning. VidTorrent is highly experimental and not yet ready for prime time but if you are a techie and want to try it you will see that what VidTorrent does is to help broadcasting signal which as opposed to movie downloads must all arrive at the same time to your computer. And with VidTorrent that´s what it does: arrive at the same time. I saw it functioning this Friday at MIT Media Lab. I saw the broadcasting and it worked very well. If I was involved with any TV channel whose revenues are advertising based I would immediately collaborate with VidTorrent as it makes it possible for many people to watch TV over the internet at much better quality than in a one source, one recipient model. With VidTorrent, as well as with Bit Torrent I can imagine a lot of amazing and very legal applications for this software. I think that what large companies have to do though is understand these revolutionary technologies early on and make them work in their for profit world rather than falling behind and fighting them when they are huge and not for profit.
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Gabriel on March 6, 2006 ·
Similar to PPLive, Roxbeam and Sopcast that were started in China a while ago? These are P2P TV Streaming sharing communities… very disruptive if high QoS is achieved. Like you say, it would make a great business or a big value distruction for incumbents.
dan on March 8, 2006 ·
Since live video, even in compressed form, would require large bandwidth, how does this protocol solve the last mile problem bottleneck? Currently dsl lines are in the low Mbps. I can see the protocl speeding up trasmission over the net, but not to the end user over DSL. How do they solve this?
Martín Varsavsky on March 8, 2006 ·
Dan,
In Europe the norm now is dsl at 10 megs, so we are ok.
Regards,
Dan on March 8, 2006 ·
And in Kores it’s 30Mbps. Probably something like DivX compression could work well over 10Mbps. The problem is that you stil need more bandwidth because there are other apps (or users) using the connection.
I like Google’s vision of “infinite bandwidth” (and instant response), we’ll get there eventually. Just imagine the possibilities!
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teleken on March 5, 2006 ·
Martin only one word from me on this.
WOW—!