There is a chinese program SopPlayer (SopCast) which lets you P2P stream video in digital TV quality, works pretty well and is basically unknown. People here use it to watch football and other sports tv via internet. I think it basically lets you broadcast anything from your PC and other people to watch it, but without having to produce all the traffic.

They didn't even need a loud name to make the technology work.

It appears that it's currently lacking one important feature: a web peer that kicks off streaming right away.

P2P can certainly lower the bandwidth requirements of the host, but for the user experience to be smooth, the video has to start right away and right now the live client appears to be taking a long time to establish connections with other peers. During that time, the user has to wait.

If the system would download from a dedicated web host in addition to peers, the experience would be much smoother, IMHO. Heck, you could even use the technology to enhance basically anything on the web by using the normal HTTP data stream, but also looking for peers with data from the same URL to increase download speed.

Right now it looks like you need a critical mass of clients viewing the video before it'll even work. I've been sitting on the video for about 5 minutes with any video appearing. My network connection shows several open connections from BTLive, but it's not sending or receiving any data.

The streaming never managed to start and every time I clicked on watch the application was downloaded again (and again).

The saddest thing anyway in my opinion is that the man featured must raise funds for his healthcare, otherwise, his words, "he wouldn't be alive today".

So only rich people have the right to live in US?

And no that's not socialist or communist, it's just common sense because many rich men were just born rich, their families may have been rich from generations, so the "survival of the fittest" doesn't make any sense at all here.

P2P Streaming Software:

* StreamTorrent

* SopCast

* TVUPlayer

* Tvants

* Veetle

* PPStream

* UUSEE

* PPlive

* Spvod

Thus BitTorrent is hardly on to a new thing here, but let's hope they can inspire some real improvements as the software is neither perfect nor mainstream.

So, uh... what is it, and how does it work? I can't find any information, just instructions on downloading the beta client.

Hello, all. I'm a software engineer working on BitTorrent's Live protocol. First, thanks for your patience while it's in Beta.

It seems many people in this thread came late to the stream, after the event was over (it was from 8:00pm to 10:00pm Pacific), so that explains why some of you weren't able to view the stream (we're working on adding archives of past streams soon).

If you'd like to be emailed invitations to future events, just fill out the email subscription link here: http://live.bittorrent.com/

If you have ideas or suggestions, you can add or vote on them here: https://bittorrentlive.uservoice.com/

It looks like a lot of you have questions about the technical details of the protocol. I'm not sure how much we're ready to disclose, but I'll mention this to the team and perhaps we can put together a juicier "about" page.

Thanks again.

This is interesting because the original BitTorrent was an interesting innovation, and it's the same people behind this. So I'm curious what (if any) interesting ideas they've had. But the page is light on details. How does this 'live streaming' differenciate from normal bittorrent?

Tried on Ubuntu and it's not working. The video keeps spinning.

For everyone whose stream isn't working, utorrent shares port with skype, so if you have skype installed then there try changing the port of either of them.

Ipv6 nodes require multicasting support. This could be an incomplete solution to a problem that is already on the way out

Not working for me either (Firefox 7 for Mac) the buffer image keeps spinning.

And whatever port it's trying to use that can't be overridden and isn't easily found anywhere is taken on both of my systems.