I spent my Saturday at the OpenTech conference in London and it was a day well spent. I do have to learn to go and listen to new things though, although talks from Tom Morris (who I later met for the first time), Simon Willison and Gavin Bell were interesting, those were subjects I already knew about or were aware about to a fair degree. What did strike me however were some of the last sessions by Tom Loosemore and Chris Jackson.
Between them they told stories which included building a peer-to-peer TV network for persisted content, and a project to become 'the DNS for media'. I've always had an interest in home entertainment, and these talks made my eyes light up. I'm really pleased to see that Tom has posted his presentation.
Tom's 'impossibox' was capable of storing 1TBs worth of media data, roughly a months worth. If that were to be networked in a P2P fashion, you could have months of recorded TV, redundantly stored in every house on your street. I think this plays into the networks hands here as well. This isn't real time data and can be sync'd, or you can download a program or series at the networks leisure without breaking net neutrality. Throw in, if there were 100 such networked boxes with a mile's radius, chances are you could take care of the P2P sharing at the local exchange so you wouldn't even need to push large amounts of data all over the place.
Although this future is a 'slightly bonkers' version, it sparks the imagination. Just think of the social networking benefits of being able to capture this data, see friends recommendations, read comments, video mashups, trailers, directors (or other users) commentaries. So much potential.
Great talk.
4 comments:
in principle robbie, the dream of a P2P impossibox is sound and quite cool too.
it works in frankfurt and hong kong where all my friends live within a 2mile radius and likely share the same exchange ...
BUT fails in london and just about every american metropolis where my closest friend is 17hops, a barley farm, 14 starbucks and a rabbit's foot away - and thats if one is lucky.
@doubleoh2: The idea isn't that you only share with your friends, but with *everyone* else who has an impossibox.
What matters most, I suspect, is how demographically diverse the people on each exchange are - the less diverse they are, the fewer boxes you'd need, since the range of popular programmes will be more limited.
The key limitation is rights. Hence the 'impossi' before the 'box'...
yes but it is exactly that notion of diversity that i am hoping to highlight .. we no longer live in homogenous comunities.
it used to be that we were content to say goodbye to the Joneses, jump into our caravans and upon arrival in Bretagne, say hello to a grinning buck toothed little simon jones*.
people shopped in the same places, worked in the same places, attended the sames schools, went on the same holidays and watched the same tv programmes.
today, this is far from true. we want to be as different as possible from our neighbbours and we go to incredulous lengths to accomplish this.
my thai food is cooked by a vietnamese doctor who trained to be a monk in burma before moving to london by way of chille...
my girlfriend drinks her soy latte at 27degs, mine must have no soya in it, be served at 31degrees with a dash of cinamon (helps my stomach)...
my socks is handwoven by little jimmie who lives in a little village near the himalayas and no i wont tell you the stockist because quality declines with demand.
you see why there is no chance in hell that I 'd be caught dead watching Numb3rs, Dirt or any studio backed mass targeted programming.
we didn't discover the borderless expanse of the internet simply to go back to constraining ourselves to the borders of SW1
footnote
*despite the small world theory, the likelihood of seeing "Anne from number 42" on my holiday is slim enough to be neglible. I take my breaks in winter for one and I spend it advising on effective plumbing and sewage disposal methods in shanty town in egypt
** io2 is doubleoh2
@doubleoh2 But you're forgetting that while two individual persons are different in likes and dislikes, we can all be lumped together like a survey and that the idea of sharing at the local exchange is just an idea which I voiced to keep the network traffic down. I think 'people' tend to watch the same stuff, now there will be differences, but spread across a hundred or a thousand nodes, each with a terabyte or more worth of storage can cover a broad range of content.
This whole idea is indeed, broken into two pieces: content distribution and personalisation. These comments have focused on distribution, but once you start bringing in applications like Last.FM into play but for video, we may just see more diversification and whilst a small possibility, Anne next door might just have that Kurosawa film that was on last night you wanted to see.
=)
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