(The spokesperson added that during the beta testing period, BitTorrent Live won’t be fully decentralized. That’s the vision we have for BitTorrent Live,” the spokesperson said. “When you’re decentralized, you’re connecting consumers to consumers, businesses to consumers. This reduces the cost of content distribution and removes intermediaries that seek to charge a “finder’s fee,” the spokesperson told VentureBeat by email. It is still built on top of a decentralized network, the same peer-to-peer technology that powers BitTorrent’s file-sharing client. The central idea behind BitTorrent Live remains largely unchanged, however. A company spokesperson confirmed that the TV element won’t be part of the new BitTorrent Live. This is a departure from the previous incarnation of BitTorrent Live, which offered access to a range of free and paid TV channels, including Bloomberg and CBC. The veteran file-sharing company is positioning BitTorrent Live as a social media app akin to Snapchat and Bytedance’s TikTok that will enable users to create and share content and connect with people with similar tastes. Live is not ready for general availability yet, but the company is accepting applications from beta testers. The company is relaunching BitTorrent Live, a Sling TV-like service it first introduced in 2011 and shut down in 2017, as a social media app for Android and iOS platforms. Register here.īitTorrent, which has been looking for ways to expand since it was acquired by blockchain startup Tron last year, today announced it is reviving one of its most ambitious services. But with today’s launch bringing it to a massively distributed mobile platform, it could start to attract an audience worthy of luring in better channel makers.Connect with top gaming leaders in Los Angeles at GamesBeat Summit 2023 this May 22-23. That’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem. To get channels to sign on, BitTorrent Live will need more viewers… which will require better content. It could offer some for pay-per-view, but cheaper than the same content on traditional TV due to the reduced broadcasting costs. It’s still working on striking deals with more name-brand channels. The problem right now is that BitTorrent Live has a pretty lackluster channel selection. The latency is roughly 10 seconds, which could be faster than terrestrial cable, as well as systems like Sling TV that can delay content more than a minute. The app features 15 channels, including NASA TV, France One, QVC Home and TWiT (This Week In Tech) that you can watch live. And that’s after being in development since 2009. Until now it’s only existed on Mac, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV - much less popular platforms. Now, almost a year after the protocol’s debut on smart TVs, and six months after it was supposed to arrive on iPhone, the BitTorrent Live app quietly became available on iOS this week. The transfer technology and the app that aggregates these channels are both called BitTorrent Live. And BitTorrent can offer that content to viewers for free or much cheaper than a cable subscription. Since P2P live streaming is so much cheaper than traditional ways to deliver live content, BitTorrent could pay channel owners more for distribution per viewer. Instead of cables and satellites, BitTorrent piggybacks on the internet bandwidth of its users. And the cable companies can charge consumers exorbitant prices because they’re sometimes the only game in town.īut BitTorrent has now done for live video what it did for file downloads: invented peer-to-peer technology that moves the burden of data transfer from a centralized source to the crowd. Cable companies can then dictate how much per monthly paying subscriber they offer the channel owners for access because there are few alternatives for live distribution. Cable companies rule TV because they control the expensive wires and satellites that can deliver low-latency live content at scale.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |