IPTV Can Work

78.9MB in under 3 min­utes via bit­tor­rent. The aver­age speed was 456kB/s, which is pret­ty impres­sive for down­load­ing via bittorrent.

I’ve been read­ing a lot about IPTV late­ly all over the inter­net and in Wired. For the unin­formed, it’s sim­ply reciev­ing video via your inter­net con­nec­tion (prefer­ably broad­band). This may be in stream­ing, real-time for­mat or stored for lat­er consumption.

One of many ear­ly adopters get­ting some press is Robert X. Cringe­ly’s NerdTV from PBS. Essen­tial­ly, it is extend­ed inter­views with tech­nol­o­gy pio­neers. Described on the shows web site as “Char­lie Rose for geeks — a one-hour inter­view show with a sin­gle guest from the world of tech­nol­o­gy.” These inter­views last around an hour and are sure­ly not for the atten­tion deficit crowd. How­ev­er, they are well done and Cringe­ly is a great inter­view­er who, while doing plen­ty of his own talk­ing, allows the main inter­est to remain on the inter­vie­wee. Any­way, although the show is done through PBS, it is only avail­able online. Prefer­ably via bit tor­rent to save band­width for the provider/host.

Well, this evening after get­ting home from work, I decid­ed to down­load episode 3, an inter­view with Sun Microsys­tem co-founder Bill Joy. I expect­ed to let it work while I went out run­ning for the next hour-and-a-half. I fired up Azu­rues and asked it to open the copied tor­rent file. Then I walked down­stairs to let the dogs back in. After com­ing back to the com­put­er, I was amazed to see that over half of the file was already down­loaded. Usu­al­ly, down­load­ing files take a great deal longer via bit­tor­rent than any oth­er large file to down­load due to the fact that you have to hand-shake for every lit­tle bit (read more about how bit­tor­rent works here), let alone find peo­ple who have the bits. This being a pop­u­lar show and recent­ly put up online (in the last cou­ple of days), this ceased to be a prob­lem. I end­ed up down­load­ing the entire pro­gram file of 78.9MB in under three minutes.

Any doubts I had about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of using tor­rent tech­nol­o­gy to bring IPTV to the mass­es has since been erased.