BitTorrent creator shows off live P2P streaming

BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen is now focused on developing a new P2P live streaming protocol that would be superior to all other streaming solutions currently on the market. Cohen demonstrated the unfinished technology this week, but he has yet to release any solid technical details. He did say, however, that the technology should be revealed this summer.

"The main areas of innovation relate to techniques he is using to manage latency at an unprecedented low while controlling network congestion," Simon Morris, BitTorrent's VP of Product Management, told TorrentFreak. "As outlined in the academic literature on live P2P content delivery, the management of live p2p streaming on the open internet requires split second reconfigurations to reroute content delivery in the fewest possible round trips between peers in the event of network hiccups. Bram's methods to manage network reconfiguration wrap rerouting together with a novel approach to congestion control. Obviously we’ll be happy to share more technical details in due course, but only once the technology reaches a level of maturity that it makes sense to share."

Although P2P live streaming has been done before, Cohen thinks that his implementation will set itself apart from competitors in terms of both efficiency and low latency. Unfortunately, until we see how it compares to competing technologies, it's too early to judge it at this point. That being said, Cohen has revolutionized the Internet with P2P technologies before, so we certainly think he could do it again.