(2004-10-18) Pesce Tv P2P

Mark Pesce on creating your own TV network based on P2P protocols. The BBC is using BitTorrent for its Flexible Tv pilot. You see, back in June we crossed something of a watershed: for the first time the volume of Video traffic surpassed the volume of Audio traffic on the Internet... Doesn't this mean that I've become a television broadcaster?... Once the TV producers figure this out, it's all over for the networks... Within a decade - and perhaps a lot sooner - the television networks will have been deprived of nearly all their pre-produced programming. Television will become a live medium - as it was in its beginning, so it will be in its old age... It is possible to build an alternative news (Journalism) network, one which will be pervasively available to the public - as pervasive any of the networks of the media megacorps (Big Media)... You put the (AM Radio) transmitters close enough together that each station is a paired receiver/transmitter, and in so doing you create a Mesh Network of transmitters... Now both of these proposals are more than just idle ideas - they're the heart of a new network - Radio Rhizome - which launched in Los Angeles a week ago today. Radio Rhizome has hijacked frequency 1680 on the AM dial to bring a continuous loop of programming to the city which the media megacorps call home. And they can't do anything about it... What we need is a single tool to wrap it all up in a nice, easy to use form. We need a tool which makes publishing content into this media stream no more difficult than selecting a audiovisual file. (Sounds like the next step after PodCasting.)

Semi-related: Mark Cuban media-related business ideas

Semi-related: Radio Re Volt is distributing $20 mini-transmitter kits. Too bad they won't mesh.