Dutch academic Dr. Johan Pouwelse knows BitTorrent well, having spent a year of his life examining its inner workings. Now, as the scientific director of the EU-funded P2P-Next team, Pouwelse and his researchers have been entrusted with €19 million from the EU and various partners, and what they want in return is nothing less than a "4th-generation" peer-to-peer system that will one day be tasked with replacing over-the-air television broadcasts.

P2P-Next is the largest publicly-funded team in the world working on such technology (though plenty of researchers at Microsoft, IBM, and countless tiny startups are also racing to deliver a better P2P experience), and today the team launched a trial program designed to test its progress to date.

What sets the project apart from the traditional BitTorrent architecture is its focus not on downloadable video, but on live streaming. Current BitTorrent implementations, focused as they are on offering easy access to downloadable content, aren't well suited to delivering live streaming TV across the Internet, but Pouwelse is convinced that this is the future. There's "no doubt that TV will come through the Internet in a few years," he told Ars earlier this week. Obviously, deployment of such a system depends on consumer electronics firms and broadcasters, but Pouwelse's job is to make sure that the technology is ready when they are.

Currently, streaming solutions like YouTube and Hulu are generally based on a server model; this doesn't scale well without inflicting massive bandwidth costs on the broadcaster. Downloadable video, already being experimented with by the BBC and NBC, can use P2P for distribution, but is only suited to after-the-fact viewing.

P2P-Next has 20 researchers working in Delft, plus more scattered across its various partners around the EU. The team uses the BitTorrent core and is building its solution on Tribler, an open source Windows/Mac/Linux P2P client developed at the Delft University of Technology and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The resulting "SwarmPlayer" software supports regular BitTorrent downloads, but it also adds support for video on demand and live video streaming to the BitTorrent protocol.

Pouwelse says that the team now needs a few thousand volunteers to hammer on the software in order to produce enough test data for the team to use as it continues to refine the code. The trial setup streams some BBC test footage along with a live feed from an Amsterdam camera (both worked fine in our testing).

For such a system to replace over-the-air TV on a continent-wide scale, significant bandwidth is clearly needed, especially when it comes to uploads. But as symmetrical connections are tough to come by, Pouwelse says that his team is trying to live by the motto, "Don't expect the world to change because of you." That means making the SwarmPlayer system work well even on existing (and grossly asymmetrical connections).



Dr. Pouwelse

Broadcasters around the world are excited about the prospects for moving content online; just check out Hulu and the BBC's iPlayer for good examples of what these firms would like to do. But ISPs aren't quite as thrilled about the prospect, largely because of 1) the size of online video files and 2) the economics of flat fees. With so many ISPs around the world charging a flat monthly fee for service, encouraging massive bandwidth usage works against the their economic interest. Pouwelse calls this a "clear economic problem," but it's one his team can do little about at the moment.

The project has funding through 2012 and has a host of problems to solve that should keep the researchers busy for as long as the money lasts. Pouwelse acknowledges that "we're making things that can be abused for piracy," but points out that P2P-Next is really designed for the future of (legal) television.

One of the project goals is the creation of a fully server-less P2P architecture; if that is achieved (still a big "if"), Pouwelse hopes that the technology can be extended to projects like Wikipedia. He notes that Wikimedia, which pays for the Wikipedia servers, simply can't afford to handle the peer production of high-def video, for instance. But if a Wikipedia P2P plug-in means that the encyclopedia lives, server-less, in the cloud, then such new features become reality.

These are big dreams for a project that has yet received little press. Pouwelse likes it that way, though; you "only go out of stealth mode or do media hype once you really know your stuff," he says. Now that P2P-Next has a working trial of its BitTorrent streaming tech up and running, it's time to spread the word.