Peercast opens source - p2p music webcasting software
Posted on 13/11/02 14:54 by Jan Willem                             
Peercast opens source - p2p music webcasting software

A while ago the United States introduced laws to compensate the record industry for songs that were broadcasted over the internet. The fees however were too high for many internet broadcasters to continue their services and many had to close down in fear of legal charges.

Peercast was born, as this software used a peer to peer (P2P) technology to broadcast. This would limit the change of pirated webcasters to be shutdown and distributed the bandwidth. And altough the software suffered from slow connection speeds, the project continued and today it has made it's source available for download.


PeerCast offers considerable savings for broadcasters because they do not have to provide bandwidth for all of their listeners. A single 56K modem can be used to broadcast to the entire network.

PeerCast is a robust network because there is no central server, each user can be a client, server or broadcaster of streams. It offers anonymity for broadcasters because there is no easy way to trace back to the original stream, it is even possible to broadcast directly to a single client located in a different country and have that provide the source for the entire network.

PeerCast can also serve streams directly to any media player. This means that it can be used in place of a Shoutcast/Icecast server to provide both direct and P2P streaming at the same time.

The client software uses the Gnutella 0.6 protocol, but is not connected to the Gnutella file share network. It works in much the same way as other Gnutella clients except that instead of downloading files, the users download streams. These streams are then exchanged in real-time with other users. No data is stored locally on any machine connected to the network.


More information on the software can be found here. Discuss software like this in our Audio Forum.

Source: Peercast.org

Reactions
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By Guest, Wednesday 13 November 2002 20:44
Again P2P shows that it is the way forward.
By stvastva, Thursday 14 November 2002 06:06
i am more excited about this then the day i reached puberty. i will see how to broadcast my entire nites show on saturday & friday nights from the club that i dj from. they will be giving me a dsl or t connection in the next few weeks - this is cool.s
By Guest, Thursday 14 November 2002 14:32
This is soooo great!!! There you are RIAA... this will be surely as important as Kazaa! RIAA, you still didn't learn from your mistakes as stubborn as you guys are. P2P will rule over your greed! PeerCast: a lot of great musicians & bands welcome and ambrace you!!!! Good Luck!!!!
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