Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming

Philip Frey

Thomas Locher

Remo Meier

Stefan Schmid

Prof. Dr. Roger Wattenhofer

Distributed Computing Group, ETH Zurich

Meeting with University of St. Gallen, FIR-HSG

September 20, 2006

Remo Meier and Stefan Schmid @ HSG Meeting, 2006 2

Goals of StreamTorrent

• Users can publish own streams over our infrastructure– Sport events, DJs, VJs, etc.– Can be searched and downloaded by other users.

• Offering own streams? TV-shows? Movies?– Collaboration possible?– Similar to Zattoo?

• Features:– Scalable to thousands of users.– Resilient against malicious users, churn, ...– Peer-to-peer, no dedicated servers needed.– Streams available everywhere in the world (behind firewalls, NATs, etc.).– “Pause Button”, (Programmable) Recording (like VCR!), …

Remo Meier and Stefan Schmid @ HSG Meeting, 2006 3

Demo

Remo Meier and Stefan Schmid @ HSG Meeting, 2006 4

From Computer Science to Law…

• Having solved the technical problems, we have to learn about the law!

• Sample Questions:– Are we responsible for contents streamed on our

StreamTorrent infrastructure / with our software? – Are uploading peers responsible for the contents?– What contracts are possible with TV stations? E.g.,

streaming SF2 to the U.S.? (License?)– Separating protocol, player, and web sites?– Switzerland vs. Europe vs. World? – Other legal threats? Is it realistic at all? Tendency in

future?

=> Cooperation with HSG, e.g., a master thesis?

Remo Meier and Stefan Schmid @ HSG Meeting, 2006 5

Thank you.

Thank you for your attention!