Live television over a peer-to-peer network

Jul 4, 2007 15:24 GMT  ·  By

LiveStation is a project currently under development, and a joint effort from Skinker and Microsoft. LiveStation is currently in beta stage, but essentially the project is designed to enable users to watch live television on their machines. "Interactive live TV on the PC that works" is in fact the slogan under which the LiveStation beta project went live. "LiveStation is a software solution, co-developed with Microsoft Research, designed to allow people to watch live TV on their desktop in a highly scalable way and without requiring broadcasters to invest a large amount of money in hardware and infrastructure," reveals a message posted on the LiveStation website.

Steve Clayton, the CTO of the UK Partner Group is the author of the two Soapbox videos embedded at the bottom. Watch them in order to get an accurate idea of what LiveStation is all about and how it relates to Joost. "Matteo showed me one of their latest projects called LiveStation - a highly efficient video streaming service using Silverlight to deliver realtime video to your desktop. The UI was lovely and we talked about the potential to do it on a mobile too - not far off," Clayton revealed.

LiveStation has as its foundation peer-to-peer technology built together by Skinkers and Microsoft Research. The bottom line is that the project should produce a solution that will combine security, stability and scalability in order to enable users to streamline live TV over the Internet.

"This product allows you to Steam live television on a computer over a peer-to-peer network, which means you don't need to use all the traditional server infrastructure and bandwidth associated with streaming. At this stage we are trying to measure the peering efficiency, which is something difficult to measure so its one of the main things at the moment. We are using Silverlight at the front end," revealed Matteo Berlucchi Co-Founder of Skinkers.

Video: LiveStation Demo

Video: Matteo Berlucchi