Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on July 20, 2008 – 2:25 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Do you have an event that you want to cover live, but you lack the budget to cover bandwidth costs? Researchers from 21 different European countries have developed software that can stream video over a peer-to-peer bittorrent network, an open source initiative that might change the way we stream video on the Internet.
Broadcasters have little bandwidth costs
With the BitTorrent zero server approach, receipients supply pieces of the data to newer recipients. It allows everyone to broadcast a live stream to thousands of people with just little personal broadband usage. Broadcasters can save millions by using the technology, although someone has to pay for the bandwidth on the end, if the broadcaster sends their data out by torrent the ISP is covering the costs.
Improving the BitTorrent protocol
Dr. Ir. Johan Pouwelse, researcher on Peer-to-Peer technology at Delft University of Technology said to torrentfreak: “To be relevant we remain BitTorrent compatible… However, traditional BitTorrent is not compatible with streaming. We solved this problem by dropping the tit-for-tat protocol and making something which is more generic, which we call Give-to-Get.” The Give-to-get protocol streams the video to users that also give broadband, rewarding “nice users”.
Try it for yourself
The live streaming technology is still work in progress. For now, the project has received a €19 million ($30 million) grant from the EU this year, and the BBC is currently testing the new BitTorrent streaming format, and you can try is out for yourself as well. Download the SwarmPlayer (Windows, Linux) and click on this Live Bittorrent Webcam Feed to tune the SwarmPlayer into Amsterdam.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on July 14, 2008 – 6:24 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Another Dutch host has been challenged in court to hand over personal information of a torrent website. The accusing party claimes that host Euroaccess facilitated violations of copyrights on the internet, and that the site torrents.to, has an illegal character and should have been taken down by the host. The outcome of the case is a big step for the anti-piracy organizations and it seems that this witch hunt is only just beginning.
The host was recently brought to court by Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, arguing that torrents.to was facilitating copyright infringement. The judge claims that the illegal activities of torrents.to are obvious, and sentenced the host to take down the torrent site within 24 hours, and has to pay all court costs of almost 17.000 euro and has to hand over the personal data of the site’s administrator. EuroAccess reacts to ISPam.nl that the torrent site is actually hosted in the UK, and argue that the case falls outside the scope of the dutch law. However, BREIN claims that the server had been pinpointed to be in the Netherlands, and was trusted by the judge for that matter.
For now, EuroAccess reacts that they requested the UK department to put the site down, and to hand over the personal information to BREIN. Sources tell that torrent.to have moved their operations to Sweden but their website seems to be offline for now. The Netherlands has been a safe haven for torrent tracking websites until recently, but it seems that hosting companies might have to comply to BREIN’s requests in the future.
Written on January 25, 2008 – 12:06 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Are you a writer and looking for more readers? Follow the example of the author of the ultimate birthday-gift book The Alchemist: Paul Coelho. He’s using filesharing networks as a way to promote his books.
Coelho thinks that giving people the possibility to swap his books for free, actually has a positive effect on sales. In a keynote speech (see below) at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he gave some strikingly good examples. When he uploaded the Russian translation of “The Alchemist”, sales in Russia went from around a 1.000 books per year to 100.000 and then to a million and more. The author said:
In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. […]
I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. […]
So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.
He thinks that this tactic will pay-off in other countries as well. I guess he’s right. Just imagine that you download his book and start reading it. After two chapters you’re captured by the book and obsessed to know how it ends. Trust me, Coelho is the kind of writer who can make you do that. Do you really want to print the whole book? No, you surf to Amazon.
Not sure if it works the same for business books since they’re generally not so captivating as thrillers.
Coelho however is preaching his new sales evangelism on the Pirate Coelho blog, where he also offers links to illegal copies of his books: “Believe it or not, the sales of the book increased a lot thanks to the Pirate Coelho site…”. See the rest of his interesting speech:
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
