Networked media

I spent the last three days at the new video track of the VON conference which has been dealing with Voice On the Net for the last ten years. As we know, video on the net is currently gaining ground on a daily basis with Youtube, Google Video, video blogging and many other passionate artists, producers and and so on. That’s the reason why video was inserted in the VON program this year and I realize that video on the net will probably face regulatory issues that VOIP had to go through in the recent years: intellectual property, copyright protection and network neutrality just to name a few. In fact, Jeff Pulver is being proactive on that issue by launching the Video On the Net Alliance to advocate for this emerging Internet video industry.

Voice over IP is disruptive. The flexibility provided by VOIP is an important factor for its success, but its impact is also quite important in that it opened the telecommunication playing field to new players that can operate outside the grasp of the incumbent telecommunication industry. Jeff Pulver officially stated that VOIP, an industry he triggered, is now well established. “We are now the incumbents who can be disrupted”.

In that respect, video on the net will allow the same type of disruption. Broadcasters and broadcast regulation can (and will) be circumvented by people and organizations who see the Net as an effective distribution platform.

Does Skype ring a bell? Well, they could potentially be #1 in both spaces. But that’s the topic of my next post.

Tags: video+on+the+net, VON2007,

Last year I reported that the Superbowl was not available off the Net. After my positive experiment last summer with the soccer WorldCup 2006, I knew I should be able to access a live peer-to-peer stream of the Superbowl somehow. Well, thanks to Technorati and this post at The Frog Blog, I was watching the show live within a minute.

Here you see the two live scenes I could watch simultaneously earlier tonight; a wifi notebook with the P2P TVUPlayer software and my plain old 36″ tube. I observed a one minute latency on the notebook.
Like the WorldCup on TVAnts, the stream robustness was impressive. Once it got started, the stream simply never stopped. Its data rate fluctuated between 350 and 400 kbps. This is not great video quality but when that’s the only signal you have access to, it’s far better than nothing. For myself, I was happy to see the original CBS Superbowl commercials live for the first time. Here in Canada, the original commercials are always “Canadianized” by the local networks except on some pricy pay TV services.

So overall, it looks like P2P streaming works well. However, TVU Networks statistics would be required in order to really be able to assess what’s going on here. Also, I don’t know at this point if TVU is a pure P2P solution of if they rely on additional servers or CDNs to provide critical capacity.

Although I find these new P2P developpments very exciting, the real new trend in the States this year was certainly HD TV. With their new HD wide screens, sports fans got closer to mother nature this year; they could enjoy and observe each and every raindrop that fell on the field in Miami Gardens!

Tags: P2P+streaming, networked+media, Superbowl, peer-to-peer

Watching TV-like content through the net is certainly gaining ground these days. Jeff Pulver and his team just published a great list of “cahnnels” only available from the net.

Link

Tags: Internet+TV, Shows, Channels, new+media