P2P TVs in China
How do you watch TVs(for example, to watch a UEFA Champions League game) if you don't have a TV set? We have the Internet, so it's time for P2P TVs.
BitTorrent is such a revolution. Following its success, there's more and more P2P applications using its algorithm. P2P TVs is such a application: a source server to encode TV signal into some stream media, and all peers to broadcast it.
The first P2P TV I ever know is GridMedia, which is the official partner of CCTV now. But it wasn't a very successful solution. It's buggy, not so stable, and the TV programs are not so well.
In my opinion, the first successful one is CoolStreaming(no website now, cause it's watched by Hong Kong copyright bureau), the related thesis was accepted by IEEE INFOCOM 2005. It's stable, straight, & cross-platform(written in Python).
The best one today may be feidian(which means "boiling point" in Chinese). It's stable(maybe not so stable, but active), fast, optimized for cernet users, and there's a Mac version(not the latest version).
The biggest problem P2P TVs must face is the copyright(maybe the best solution is associate with TV stations). After fixing the problem, it will be a revolution!
