IT Milk: entry

Some Chinese foreign exchange students at Wilkes University introduced me to an amazing P2P TV-watching program called PPStream. The name “PPStream” stands for peer-to-peer streaming video. Combine BitTorrent with Youtube, and then you have a fully functional multimedia pwnage software like PPStream.

It took me a while to understand how this program works, and I still don’t know the technical details because I can’t read the Chinese website. You connect as a PPStream client, and you select a video from a channel list. Each video has a percentage associated with it, and that indicates how healthy the distribution of the video is. The higher the percentage is, the better your streaming will be. Then, the video obviously buffers and then you get a fully uninterrupted connection to your selection.

PPStream is like walking into a virtual movie theater that is constantly looping its thousands of movies. When you select a movie channel, you will most likely stumble into the middle of the movie. But after the credits roll, you can watch it from the beginning.

The coolest part about it is that the TV is live. PPStream has movies too, but the TV channels are somehow streamed live without any previous uploading from users. A few nights ago, I watched the NBA game of Utah Jazz vs Golden State Warriors in real-time.

I asked my Chinese friends how this can be free, since I can watch recent movies like Apocalypto on it without paying anything to the movie distribution companies. And, since they mentioned that most internet users in China are using this program, I questioned how cable companies and movie companies can make any profit. This is worse than DVD piracy. My only guess is that this is possible because of the Communist Chinese government: it’s easy to blame everything on Communism when you can’t understand something.

Why don’t we have something like this in America? Probably because it would be shut down within the first 24 hours. I can’t imagine the copyright infringement issues related to a program like this.