EU funds P2P project

WHILE THE UK and US crack down hard on P2P file sharing, the European Union seems to be doing exactly the opposite; by shelling out 14 million euros (£10.5 million, $22 million) to send TV programmes over the net.

Another five million euros (£3.7million) in funding for the project is being put up by 21 other partners. Thjese include the BBC, the European Broadcasting Union, Lancaster University, Markenfilm, Pioneer Digital Design Centre Limited, and the VTT Technical Research Centre.

The team developing the now well-funded project is P2P-Next, which caught the EU's eye with its winning pitch at the seventh Framework project, which apparently encourages European cooperation and technical excellence.

P2P-Next is going to create a system which will be able to channel programmes straight to a home's TV set. The four-year research project will apparently be based on the already widely used BitTorrent technology, by which file sharers already swap movies and music.

Peer-to-peer networks don't have a central host distributing content. They work by machines downloading a certain video and making bits of it accessible to everyone that wants it, thereby spreading the load more evenly across the network.

The project's co-ordinator, Jari Ahola, from Finland's VTT technical research centre reckons that, for the broadcasters, "the incentive is to take their distribution mechanism beyond terrestrial, satellite and cable." He also added that the system would be able to cope not only with stored content for download, but also with streamed content sent from live programmes and sporting events like football matches. Currently, the interwibble isn't capable of properly broadcasting live events to millions of people at once.

P2P Next says it'll build its system on the new Tribler technology being developed at Holland's Delft University of Technology. The project's main aims are to advance a "next-generation" Internet TV distribution system using P2P and social interaction.
Tribler is programmed in the so called "Pseudo Code" Python computer language selected for its relative simplicity (as opposed to double Dutch), its convenience, its cross-platform execution abilities, and the fact that it can be programmed really quickly.

Mr Ahola reckons that the project will already have made some parts of its system available by August 2008. The complete Beta version will take about 16 months. µ