Today the German District Court of Hamburg has prohibited the distribution of the P2P software Cybersky-TV. This program is build on ByteTornado, a sort of BitTorrent on steroids, and allows the anonymous recording of TV streams without being bothered by DRMs. The software cuts the images in strips and puts a time stamp on them before an exchange, after which the receiving end puts uses the time stamps to put the strips back in the right order to create the original image.

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The court confirmed a temporary injunction against Cybersky-TV and the company behind it, TCU, which was obtained by Pay TV channel Premiere. Premiere feared that their programs would be distributed by Cybersky-TV after they had been decoded on a PC. The court has now also prohibited that TCU "advertises" that its software makes "free Pay TV" possible. TCU did not deny the possibility that their software could be used for copyright infringing uses, but stated that it was to the copyrightsholder (Premiere) to come down on the individuals that might offer illegal streams.

A spokesperson of TCU said that the company will appeal, though the ruling has not been released yet. (Hope to report more as soon as it has...)

More initiatives on TV-Free.org to watch free TV online.

Changing the laws of broadcasting

New technology has always been an important driving force behind cultural life. In younger years we have seen this recurring on a more and more global scale. The medium that in itself probably has had the most major impact on cultural life in the past 50 years, television, may be about to be transformed by a technology that aspires to change the laws of broadcasting itself: Cybersky-TV. It is turning the distribution model of broadcasting from 'one to many' into 'many to many'. Is it a killer app on the verge of breakthrough?

What is Cybersky-TV?

Cybersky-TV is a free software application for sharing television signals. It allows users with a broadband internet connection to share the TV channels they are able to receive. TV channels can be shared irrespective of the means of reception, be it by cable, terrestrial or by satellite, be it analog or digital, as long as there's a way of getting the signal to your pc. You can watch incoming channels in almost real time. There will be a constant delay of about 5 to 10 seconds.

How does it work?

IPTV is the general term used for all technologies that use the internet to distribute television and video signals. It could be a paid service in combination with your internet/cable subscription, for example. It could be a service by the TV station, either free of paid for. Almost without exception getting the signal to the viewer involves a traditional client/server architecture: the client computer asks for a signal and the server computer sends a data stream containing the signal to the client. The signal provider needs to send every user an individual stream. When broadcasting live over the internet providers are literally sending thousands of times identical streams from their servers to the viewers' computers. It's an obvious waste of bandwidth (and therefore money) for the provider's server in particular, and for the whole internet infrastructure as a whole.

With peer-to-peer (P2P) technology data can be distributed in a far more cost-effective manner. Cybersky-TV uses this P2P approach. For this the ByteTornado protocol was created. Similar to existing P2P protocols such a eDonkey, BitTorrent, Exeem, Gnutella and Kazaa, ByteTornado is sharing data delivery workloads across connected client systems as well as the distributor's own server infrastrucure. This way it drastically decreases the operational costs for a stream provider. Visit the ByteTornado web site for more information.

What do I need to watch Cybersky-TV?

All you need is a broadband connection, the ctv.exe application (ca. 220 kB) and the appropriate codec to decode the data stream. And a PC of course. Your broadband connection should have a download speed of at least 400kbit/sec, which is rather common these days. Slower connections work as well, but the quality may suffer.

What do I need to share TV signals?

Apart from the above mentioned ctv.exe application and broadband connection you'll need to have a way to provide a videosignal: an analog or digital tv-card, or if you decide to operate your own TV-station a webcam and/or video content on your hard drive or on DVD. Your broadband connection should have a upload speed of at least 356kbit/sec.

In what sense is it better than regular TV?

It's free (no spyware, no adware, no dials, no malware). There's an unlimited number of channels. Channels are available worldwide. There is no server capacity limit for broadcasters. You can watch without a TV (e.g. in the office).

More initiatives on TV-Free.org to watch free TV online.

Are there any drawbacks?

Videotext and close caption are not supported. If you want to watch on your TV, you need to connect it to your PC (this can be done quite easily). If your internet connection suffers from traffic problems, Cybersky-TV will too.

Is this bad news for TV stations?

On the contrary. It's TV as it has always been, just distributed differently. Making TV has always been a costly affair, particularly the distribution of it to the viewers. This now changes thanks to Cybersky-TV. Whether this is bad news for any particular TV station, depends on their own perspective. Fact is, whether Cybersky-TV will be a success or not, that peer-to-peer technology is going to change the way TV signals arrive to the viewers. This means risks as well as opportunities for everyone.

So what about radio then?

What applies for television, applies for radio in a very similar way. Cybersky-TV's peer-to-peer framework can just as easily be used for sharing radio. Radio stations do not longer need to spend a lot of money to keep their internet streams on line. On line radio stations do not longer have to suffer from their own success and can invest in content instead.

I want to try it. Where can I get it?

The program is ready but not available yet. The german pay-TV company Premiere has managed to get a temporary ban on the release from the regional court in Hamburg. This ban is likely to be lifted on April 26. Check the official download page for more details on the release date.

Before even thinking of downloading or using Cybersky-TV, make sure that you always abide by the law.

More initiatives on TV-Free.org to watch free TV online.

Peer-to-peer

Zeropaid also published an article on this.

A definition from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a network that relies on computing power at the edges (ends) of a connection rather than in the network itself.

A pure peer-to-peer file transfer network does not have the notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both "clients" and "servers" to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement differs from the client-server model where communication is usually to and from a central server. A typical example for a non peer-to-peer file transfer is an FTP server. One user uploads a file to the FTP server, then many others download it, with no need for the uploader and downloader to be connected at the same time.

Some networks and channels, such as Napster, OpenNap, or IRC @find, use a client-server structure for some tasks (e.g. searching) and a peer-to-peer structure for others. Networks such as Gnutella or Freenet, use a peer-to-peer structure for all purposes and are sometimes referred to as true peer-to-peer networks, though Gnutella at least is greatly facilitated by directory servers which inform peers of the network addresses of other peers.

Peer-to-peer architecture embodies one of the key technical concepts of the internet, described in the first internet RFC dated 7 April 1969. More recently the concept has achieved wide prominence among the general public in the context of the absence of central indexing servers in architectures used for exchanging multimedia files.

Advantages of peer-to-peer networks

An important goal in peer-to-peer networks is that the bandwidth of all clients can be used, so the total bandwidth - and usually the available download bandwidth for the average user - grows with the number of nodes, instead of all clients having to share the bandwidth of one server, where adding more clients could mean slower data transfer for all users.

When the term peer-to-peer was used to describe the Napster network, it implied that the peer protocol nature was important, but in reality the great achievement of Napster was the empowerment of the peers (i.e., the fringes of the network) in association with a central index which made it fast and efficient to locate available content. The peer protocol was just a common way to achieve this.


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eMule (eDonkey, Kademlia) Epicea (Epicea, BitTorrent, eDonkey, Overnet, FastTrack, Gnutella) GiFT (own OpenFT protocol, and with plugins - FastTrack, eDonkey and Gnutella) Gnucleus (Gnutella, Gnutella2) iMesh Light (Fasttrack, eDonkey, Gnutella, Gnutella2) Kazaa (FastTrack, Joltid PeerEnabler) Kazaa Lite (FastTrack, Joltid PeerEnabler) MindGem (eDonkey, Kademlia) MLDonkey (BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack, Gnutella, Gnutella2, Kademlia) (Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Palm OS, Java) mlMac (BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack, Gnutella, Gnutella2) Morpheus (Gnutella, Gnutella2) Poisoned (FastTrack, Gnutella) Shareaza (BitTorrent, eDonkey, Gnutella, Gnutella2) WinMX (Napster, WPNP) XNap (OpenNAP, GiFT, Limewire, Overnet, ICQ, IRC) (Java) Zultrax (Gnutella, ZEPP)