Friday, June 10

Internet television / p2p TV / peer based media

I just stumbled on this little definition in it's early stages on Wikipedia. It leaves a lot to be desired, but at the same time it contained an excerpt on Peer based TV distribution, aka. peer based media. There's one irony about the concept of IPTV as I see it, it's will be and already is so radically different than regular TV that I believe the name is a misnomer. Likewise though Interactive TV is also a misnomer. It's a whole new ballgame neither defined by it's interactivity nor it's lack of interactivity. That's why I prefer to just call it "peer media" or "participatory media". I believe it's core concept is that it's peer based. Nothing more, nothing less.

Internet television - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Initiatives to use peer-to-peer technology to distribute live TV are just starting to emerge. The main advantage of this approach over traditional distribution models is that it provides a way of sharing data delivery workloads across connected client systems as well as the distributor's own server infrastructure, which drastically decreases the operational costs for a stream provider. Costs don't rise with rising user numbers. Popular TV streams don't need to suffer from server overloads anymore, because not every user needs to access the source server.

The developments in P2P TV are likely to give Internet television a boost, but the industry is already fearing for a new Napster scenario, i.e. real-time TV-sharing. With the arrival of P2P TV and the ever growing number of people with a broadband connection, this year we might see Internet television break through to a mainstream audience. Some initiatives for P2P TV are already working, others are being tested."

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