BitTorrent Live stream of Egyptian protests | Hacker News Reader

BitTorrent Live stream of Egyptian protests

live.bittorrent.com

63 pointspwmckenna11 comments

I would love to see someone familiar with torrents and streaming videos to put together a project that enables decentralized but "bundled video streams" of live video content coming from handheld devices like the GoPro. The reason for bundling the streams is to make sure new streams that have not attracted a swarm can piggyback off the swarm for existing streams. Inclusion in the bundled stream would just require a quorum of the existing streams choosing to update their stream to include the new stream. This would also help discover since you could "flip" through the channels on the same bundled stream.

That's a great idea and an important next step in this type of technology and the world of reporting.

Another approach would be to let the swarm nominate videos to include in the bundle. Whenever a new stream is added, others in the stream are notified of its inclusion, they can check out that new stream, if they think it is relevant to the original stream, they can start bundling it in as well. As more nodes broadcast the same new stream, it rises in the ranking of nominated streams for inclusion. Once a quorum of swarm nodes thinks a stream should be bundled it is added. Of course other users can specifically avoid certain streams if they think it is spam or if they have limited bandwidth to share.

This approach would basically work like a "decentralized" video subreddit. i.e. an "ephemeral" social network with accompanying live video.

Streaming of live comments/chat over torrents would also be fascinating.

The Reuters stream is live and crystal clear: http://live.reuters.com/Event/World_News

Not sure if this has been posted in another thread, so I apologize if this is already out there.

The NY Times is doing a good job of keeping their coverage up to date.

http://projects.nytimes.com/live-dashboard/egypt-political-c...

It's a 2 megabit stream at 854x480.

To clarify, this is not streamed from the actual location.

It's an RT live feed that's being pushed out as a BitTorrent live stream from a safe home, probably nowhere near Egypt.

It's incredibly inspiring to see the strength of Egyptian people. I would've thought after the first revolution their energy would've been spent and they simply wouldn't have the numbers to try it a second time. Boy was I wrong.

Americans, Canadians, British, Germans, French and all the rest of you NATO puppets, take a look at what real democracy is.

Can anyone speak to the quality of the stream?

Pretty good, not HD but steady

Cool.

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