£11m P2P stream project starts public trial

P2P-Next, the £11m international project developing a peer-to-peer internet video streaming platform, has begun public trials of a beta application.

The consortium is composed of European broadcasters, technologists and academics, with the BBC taking a leading role. Earlier this year the group announced it had secured €14m funding from the European Union.

P2P-Next has now made a BitTorrent application called SwarmPlayer available for public download. The software, which can be used to view a five-minute BBC weather report and a live webcam feed of central Amsterdam, sends performance data back to the developers.

The project is seeking to "allow a single player to download movies, watch video-on-demand, and watch live video streams using one technology, while taking advantage of the popularity and maturity of existing BitTorrent clients", according to its website.

Speaking about the project in February, George Wright, from BBC rapid development unit, said: "We're aiming to build Mac, Windows and GNU/Linux clients, as well as a dedicated hardware set top box client, to allow us to deliver the core technical goals: an open standards-based 'next-generation' internet television distribution system, using P2P and social interaction."