The goal of the trial is to assess the demand for downloadable content and whether it’s possible to effectively reduce the bandwidth costs of the streaming platform currently in use. The decision to use BitTorrent, the most efficient P2P protocol, was an easy one.

Through the current platform NPO streams are watched more than 13 million times per month. With the BitTorrent-powered streams, users will offer their own bandwidth which means that streaming costs could go down drastically.

NPO has partnered on the project with the Dutch company Bitnomica, who use the Open Source Swarmplayer software developed at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands. Due to rights issues, viewers have to use a special player through which the files will be viewable for 10 days after the initial broadcast. They can download the .tstream files with most of the regular BitTorrent clients, but the player seems to work best.

Currently, only a few hundred recent videos are available, but a back-catalogue of tens of thousands could be added if the half-year trial turns out to be a success. During the trial NPO aims to put as much fresh content on BitTorrent as possible, with daily updates of all the latest video broadcasts.

Although NPO is the first major TV broadcaster to widely adopt BitTorrent, there have been others who’ve made videos available this way. Norwegian public broadcasting organization (NRK) has previously set up its very own BitTorrent tracker to distribute several of their TV-shows, DRM free. In Canada, public television broadcaster CBC used BitTorrent to distribute one of its TV-shows after they ran into distribution problems.

If successful, this trial could be a major breakthrough for BitTorrent-powered streaming as it might convince other parties to try it out and get a taste of the future of web-based video delivery. In the UK the BBC has been eager to adopt BitTorrent as well. They did a trial earlier this year but thus far rights issues have contributed in holding back a roll-out on a wider scale.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

The goal of the trial is to assess the demand for downloadable content and whether it’s possible to effectively reduce the bandwidth costs of the streaming platform currently in use. The decision to use BitTorrent, the most efficient P2P protocol, was an easy one.

Through the current platform NPO streams are watched more than 13 million times per month. With the BitTorrent-powered streams, users will offer their own bandwidth which means that streaming costs could go down drastically.

NPO has partnered on the project with the Dutch company Bitnomica, who use the Open Source Swarmplayer software developed at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands. Due to rights issues, viewers can’t download or stream the videos with their regular BitTorrent clients. They’ll have to use a special player through which the files will be viewable for 10 days after the initial broadcast.

Currently, only a few hundred recent videos are available, but a back-catalogue of tens of thousands could be added if the half-year trial turns out to be a success. During the trial NPO aims to put as much fresh content on BitTorrent as possible, with daily updates of all the latest video broadcasts.

Although NPO is the first major TV broadcaster to widely adopt BitTorrent, there have been others who’ve made videos available this way. Norwegian public broadcasting organization (NRK) has previously set up its very own BitTorrent tracker to distribute several of their TV-shows, DRM free. In Canada, public television broadcaster CBC used BitTorrent to distribute one of its TV-shows after they ran into distribution problems.

If successful, this trial could be a major breakthrough for BitTorrent-powered streaming as it might convince other parties to try it out and get a taste of the future of web-based video delivery. In the UK the BBC has been eager to adopt BitTorrent as well. They did a trial earlier this year but thus far rights issues have contributed in holding back a roll-out on a wider scale.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

BitTorrent is very effective in reducing bandwidth costs and thanks to technology developed by the P2P-Next team, it can also be used to stream TV-shows. Today P2P-Next has launched a new trial where they stream an episode of R&DTV in high definition.

In collaboration with the BBC, who kindly provided a HD episode of R&D TV, the researchers of P2P-Next will use this experiment to gather user feedback and demonstrate that the technology will allow video to be streamed to the public, by the public.

If successful, following further optimization the technology will allow everyone with a standard Internet connection to stream high definition video to thousands of people without having to invest in additional hardware or bandwidth.

“Our ambition level is to craft the next-generation of P2P technology,” P2P-Next scientific director, Dr. Johan Pouwelse, told TorrentFreak. “We hope that our Open Source P2P technology can provide existing user-generated video communities with high quality streaming video.”

Indeed, with this BitTorrent-powered streaming technology it should be fairly easy to create a mashup between The Pirate Bay and YouTube. Thanks to BitTorrent the users take care of the bandwidth, which significantly reduces the costs involved with running a video streaming site.

The current trial is limited to Windows users only, but the streaming plugin will also be available for other platforms in the near future. In order to stream the episode directly from the trial website, users have to install a plugin first, then the R&DTV episode should start to play.

Pouwelse further encourages those who are able to participate in the trial to submit feedback and report bugs. As the technology is only in an early stage of development, problems with some video cards are expected to occur, but it should work fine with the majority.

Those who want to participate can check out the BitTorrent-powered episide of BBC’s R&DTV here. Details on the number of users connected and the bandwidth transferred can be found on the statistics page.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.