The Unexpected Tech

For the first time ever, this year’s Super Bowl was streamed live online, to the initial delight, and then disappointment, of fans, who experienced poor image quality and delays of several minutes.

The man behind the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, Bram Cohen, is developing software that could fix such problems. This protocol facilitates the distribution of large files by having users serve up fragments of a file to other users as they download it. This makes it possible to share very large files without a single central server.

Cohen’s company, also known as BitTorrent, is now working on technology that could allow a person with far fewer resources than a TV studio to stream live footage to an audience of millions.

“To this day, most of the live video people consume isn’t over the Internet, it’s over the cable system,” says Cohen. “Cable is very well optimized for sending out live events at a low delay, which has, to date, been very hard over the Internet.”

Cohen’s solution, known as BitTorrent Live, could make it possible for almost anyone to offer a live stream to millions. Like the original BitTorrent, the scheme relies on viewers all running software that links into a network that distributes data directly between users, in what is known as a peer-to-peer design, which is much more efficient than every user being served by a central server. A key benefit of the approach is that as more people try to download a file, the network’s capacity to serve that file also grows.

Cohen says that his main interest is in the technical challenge, but adds that changing how people consume video does matter to him. “I view the one-way nature of television as a bad thing, and moving to a medium with integrated interactivity and social features will be a good thing,” he says.

Reducing the resources needed to offer live video could even help journalists, bloggers, or protestors trying show the world what they are witnessing. Online video was important to last year’s protests in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries; live feeds with large audiences could have an even larger impact.

Cohen says BitTorrent Live could even help conventional broadcasters and studios distribute their premium TV and movie content more efficiently. He says the approach may even be better than centralized streaming services, which typically cap quality to keep costs down. However, as with the original BitTorrent protocol, the software could potentially be used to stream copyrighted material—without providing a single point where it can easily be shut down.

It’s too early for Cohen to say exactly how BitTorrent Live will be made available, and whether (like his original blockbusting technology) it will be done in a way that allows third parties to use it as they wish. “The protocol is still early in development, so we want to maintain the ability to [improve] it in a reliable way,” he says. “We’ll have more information on potential third-party implementations once we are closer to launch.”