The ingest server then distributes the stream to the first 10 peers. In the BitTorrent Live workflow, the broadcaster creates a video feed from its studio, encodes it into a real-time messaging protocol (RTMP) stream, and sends it to the BitTorrent ingest server. As long as viewers have a decent ping between them, Schwartz says, distance isn’t an issue. While the team thought that geography would be a limiting factor, that didn’t turn out to be the case. Even viewers in a large audience aren’t many hops from the source, he notes, and latency between peers is low.īitTorrent’s sharing system is effective no matter where in the world viewers are. The live stream is split up and spread out exponentially. And if there are 10,000 viewers, that’s 99.99% offload. If there are 1,000 viewers, that’s 99% offload. If an event has 100 viewers, that’s 90% offload, Schwartz says. That’s a huge reduction in how much data the host needs to push out. Everything after that is handled by peer-to-peer connections. With BitTorrent Live, the server only streams the live signal to 10 viewers. The cost savings from BitTorrent Live come from the way P2P networks share content. That’s about what viewers get with direct broadcast satellite, he adds. If you read about what’s going to happen on Twitter a minute before it happens, that’s not a great situation.”īitTorrent Live can beat that experience by offering 6 to 8 seconds of latency, Schwartz says. The whole point of sports on TV is the drama of not knowing what’s going to happen. You’re finding out that Steph Curry is ejected 45 seconds before you actually see it in the live stream. “Case in point, you’re watching the basketball game last night on a live stream and you’re watching the same basketball game on Twitter. “In a world where people are consuming live television at the same time as they’re consuming a live event on another screen, say Twitter, you end up with the Twitter feed being substantially ahead of the TV stream,” Schwartz says. That’s an issue for second-screen viewers, who might view spoilers over their own social network accounts. Latency for live video starts at 30 seconds at a minimum, since HTTP uses progressive downloading. The other problem with live online video, Schwartz says, is that HLS relies on HTTP, which he notes is a 20-year-old text transfer protocol. That doesn’t happen with BitTorrent Live, either, which keeps costs reliably low (more on that later). That doesn’t happen with television, where broadcasting a signal costs the same amount no matter how many people watch. For every extra viewer, there’s an incremental extra cost. One of the big challenges is that it gets expensive pretty quickly,” Schwartz says. “There are a lot of problems in live streaming. Does the world still need a P2P live video solution? In 2016, when we spend a huge chunk of our TV viewing time online and even massive live events typically work without a problem, it didn’t make much of a splash. If it had launched in 2010, BitTorrent Live would have been a groundbreaking platform. “We really wanted to … make a very robust system that traditional broadcasters would be comfortable sending their content out through,” Schwartz adds. BitTorrent Live had to meet that level of expectation. The reason people like live television is because they turn it on and it just works, Schwartz says. They needed a reliable ingest solution and built-in redundancy in case one stream goes down. The team created a way to integrate the live platform with broadcast television workflows. The app has since launched for Fire TV as well. The team focused on creating a tvOS version, as well as upcoming iOS and Android apps. There were just a lot of little technical details in making it work,” explains Erik Schwartz, VP of media for BitTorrent.įor the past year, BitTorrent’s live video team focused on turning the protocol into a platform that broadcasters could get behind. Apparently, getting it just right took a little longer than Cohen expected. In May 2016, BitTorrent finally launched a live multichannel video app, debuting on Apple TV. “I’m trying to get it so all that video compression can be moved online, so that television will truly move to the internet,” Cohen said. He just needed to finetune some latency and packet loss issues and he’d have it. While he wouldn’t comment on a release date, he knew that he was close to cracking it. In October 2010, Streaming Media spoke to Bram Cohen, BitTorrent’s chief scientist and the creator of the BitTorrent protocol, about his pet project: using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to stream live video.
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