The biggest entry barrier today to a new media venture, particularly broadcasting, is distribution. Satellite capacity can be relatively cheaper; persuading cable operators to carry your channel is another story, involving both money and considerable on-the-ground lobbying. And in this scenario, imagining launching a TV channel on a platform that reaches millions of viewers across the world with just a home broadband connection sounds impossible. Well it is very much possible.
Aspiring broadcasters need only content of their own, a Windows or Linux PC, a broadband Internet connection, and our freely downloadable application. Even if you are an amateur broadcaster, you can create channels about your travels, your hobbies, or your children’s sports teams, or just put up a great webcam. Have you heard of TVU’s free software? If you just want to watch TV on your PC using their software, you need a connection with only one-tenth of the speed. The difference between these services and the older, browser-based services is in terms of the end-user experience. While on a browser-based service like youtube.com the selection of videos are of shorter duration (usually two to ten minutes), the new breed of services offer con-tinuous channels in addition to video-on-demand.
UNDERSTANDING THE WORKING
The traditional method of delivering content was transferring the content when a user’s computer (the client) requests for some information from another computer on the Internet that hosts it (the server.) The server then chops the content into packets, slaps on the address of the end-receiver on each packet and pushes it onto the Internet. Once out there, the packets are further pushed or guided to their end-destination by many devices called routers, based on the destination address found on them, much like a courier service that routes a packet meant for you.
While the system worked very well for text, for heavier content such as high-quality audio and video, it becomes increasingly unsuited and uneconomical. Under the earlier technology, if there are 100 people who want to watch a particular video stream or event, the server replicates the content 100 times and sends it out 100 times, one to each viewer. While that was okay for text, there are two problems when you apply it to video. One is that replicating the video stream for each new viewer takes up too much of the server’s processing capacity. Second is that it consumes too much bandwidth.
The new solutions get around the problem of high server costs by shifting the job of multiplying the streams further down the channel. While in the current system, a server would send out 100 channels of the same content to 100 listeners, the attempt is to reduce it to a few, or even just one. The job of multiplying the stream is passed onto the users, in case of the majority of new solutions, or the routers, for a certain niche and emerging technologies. For now, companies like Intercast and Cisco are targeting situations where the server and the client are both in the same network.