![]() Don’t expect big-name events from the likes of the Ultimate Fighting Championship here, as Fightbox shows only small regional events. All I know is that when I tuned in, there was a dancing clown.įAST&FUN: Channeling Red Bull TV, FAST&FUN focuses on extreme sports, like racing, skiing, and boating.įightbox: If you like combat sports, Fightbox is great, because it’s nothing but fights: boxing, wrestling, and mixed martial arts. Clubbing TV: BitTorrent Live describes this channel as being all about club music.AWE: Think “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: The Channel.” Oddly, this channel also seems to feature a number of shows about nature and survival.You probably haven’t heard of most of these mysterious channels: ![]() The starting lineup for BitTorrent Live is… eclectic, to put it mildly. Ideally, no loading screen would be necessary, but at least it’s interesting. One nice touch is that when you switch to another channel, the loading screen is a drawing of a geodesic pattern. BitTorrent Live is purely live, so there’s no pausing or scrubbing. When you’re done browsing, press Menu to return to the video. You’re supposed to be able to view upcoming shows on the current channel, but the show lists display only the channel name, so it’s not yet helpful. Press the Siri Remote touchpad to view the current show and swipe down to see the channel lineup. But I never got the confirmation message, even after multiple attempts to resend it! (Perhaps some spam filters are dubious of messages that mention BitTorrent.) Eventually, I tried signing up with a Gmail account, and that worked.īitTorrent Live’s interface is straightforward, if a touch odd. You have to create a free BitTorrent account and link it to the app, and that requires clicking a link in a confirmation email message. The less good news is that BitTorrent Live’s interface and channel lineup are both weird. It’s an interesting experiment, but the practical takeaway is that we now have a new Apple TV app with free, live content. Comcast has had a history of slowing down Internet connections that use BitTorrent, but I haven’t seen any such problems with BitTorrent Live. However, you needn’t worry about your ISP confusing BitTorrent Live with a server, since it should appear to be a typical peer-to-peer app. says that leads to about an extra 20–30 percent of bandwidth usage versus regular HTTP video streaming, but that doesn’t count bandwidth saved by BitTorrent’s inherent efficiency over HTTP. The Apple TV app itself works as a “fully functioning peer in the swarm.” In plain English, this means that as you stream a channel from the BitTorrent network, the app on your TV also streams that channel to other viewers. hopes to eliminate the need for them by making every viewer into a broadcaster as well, shifting resource usage from a fixed group of servers to the entire network. To avoid overloading the source servers, large streaming media providers like Netflix spread the load by relying on content delivery networks (CDNs), which take over the heavy lifting of delivering the content to end users.ĬDNs work well, but they can be expensive. Traditional video streaming works by downloading content from a remote server or, more typically, a “cloud” of remote servers. is jumping into legitimate video streaming with BitTorrent Live, currently exclusive to the fourth-generation Apple TV but with clients for the Mac and iOS on the horizon. In recent years, BitTorrent has tried to find uses for its technology beyond file sharing, such as the BitTorrent Bleep chat client and the BitTorrent Sync file syncing tool (think Dropbox, without centralized servers). I’ve complained before about the paucity of desirable apps on the Apple TV, but a surprise player has jumped in to help fill the gap: BitTorrent Inc., the company behind the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol that’s a favorite of copyright infringers.
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