Multipoint media broadcasting is here

Multipoint media broadcasting is here

Posted a few links yesterday to TVBrick and to Winamp's new Nullsoft TV standard (shoutcast video, essentially).

I think this is significant. Last night, this dude was broadcasting 10 channels of TV shows, anime, rock videos. Basically, he had an all content channel with no commercials. Meanwhile, AOL was brodcasting Sessions@AOL and other stuff with commercials too. Quality was very good.

Now that my old laptop is a full-time TV station, I could easily watch stuff on the living room flat panel. I have TV over broadband. It exists, it's easy to use (once you solve the location issue of PC in the TV room), it's fast, and it's pretty high quality. Plus the selection is already quite good.

I think it's going to grow fast.

Will they sue Mr. SaltyChimp.com for broadcasting old Seinfelds? I assume so. Then they will launch the P2P multicasting video service. Or they will broadcast from a few points overseas. Or they will just produce their own content (music videos, documentaries, shorts). When you can watch them as a stream, you will actually throw them up on your TV. Streaming is a lean back experience, unlike browsing. It can work on the TV, even if the content isn't great. (That is, if media clips haven't worked on the web, it's because they are too interactive. People want the lean back experience and the new stream channels provide this.)

Another brilliant aspect of the user-created content broadcasts is that it solves the bandwidth issue. It never makes sense for CNN to launch a full stream channel, b/c the bandwidth costs are too high. But for all the small users who do not actually pay per-unit for their bandwidth, it makes sense up to a certain threshold. On the same principal that makes P2P networks work, they donate bandwidth to the commons.