A Note of P2PTV

P2PTV is a way you can watch TV programs online. But it is different from hulu, youtube, the program data itself may not from any specific site, like hulu.com or youtube.com, but from any peer in its p2p network. You could infer that it's free and illegal. (At least not all legal.) On some popular P2PTV networks, you can see some live TV programs. Some live sport program can attract a lot audience. It is convenient for those who has no TV but willing to watch the live programs.

However, the willing to watch TV remotely may be met by some placeshifting devices, like Slingbox and LocationFree, P2PTV's low cost and device-free properties must give itself some priorities for people with economic concern.

A research reveal a part of the secret a P2PTV network, PPLive. The major components of PPLive's architecture are :



1. The streaming peer node
2. The channel stream server
3. The tracker server
The tracker server make me wonder how similar it is to BitTorrent.

Though P2PTV has legislation problems to solve, I wonder if any media company (owner of lots of content) would like to adopt P2PTV as a economical method to sell its content offshore.

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Picture from "A measurement study of a large-scale P2P IPTV system", page 3/16, Fig 1. Mesh-pull P2P live streaming architecture