New broadcasting
: IT&W points us to some very cool peer-to-peer radio and TV streaming (as opposed to file-sharing) at Flatcast (auf Deutsch but don’t worry about it; just click on a stream; download the light player and go).
P2P got a “bad” name thanks to the Napster hubub but the architecture is sound. Point-to-point broadcasting is terribly inefficient — as I found just yesterday, on Fat Tuesday, when my Bourbocam Real server software started creaking and cracking like Das Boot under too damned much water. We were serving almost 200megs of traffic from one server alone (bandwidth may be getting cheaper, but it’s still expensive; ditto servers; ditto Real licenses). If we’d had this P2P technology, we could have served more with less.
This works for big sites but it also could work for blog-sized media (I just wonder how many P’s it takes to make P2P streaming efficient).
