Getting BitTorrent to work effectively with live streams requires several major adjustments. There are still a lot of problems to solve though, before the first version becomes available to the public. I intend on changing that,” Bram told us. “I think there’s a very large market for live in general, and to date noone has proven that a p2p solution can meet the real-world requirements for being an acceptable live solution. He told us that his BitTorrent-powered live streaming implementation is still in an early stage of development, but he hopes to have a working version ready “sometime next year”. This comment did of course peak our interest, so we decided to get in touch with Bram Cohen to ask him what he’s up to exactly. “Tribler’s live streaming benchmarks are a joke. Last week he tweeted that he will beat Tribler’s solution in terms of delay. There are currently a few dozen people working on P2P-based live streaming, and they are soon to be joined by Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. Last year we reported that CNN had experimented with a P2P-based live stream, and the Tribler research team has already shown that it’s possible to use BitTorrent to stream live footage. To keep video services from collapsing and to save bandwidth costs, it seems almost inevitable that content providers will have to look at P2P-based streaming solutions.
Thus far the demand for video continues to grow, and it is even expanding to live video.
At the same time it’s also resulting in huge bandwidth bills for streaming sites such as YouTube. The online video streaming revolution has hugely increased the use of bandwidth by individual consumers.