DTV : television :: podcasting : radio

I feel like reprising my first podcasting post from last October. Just when you thought you had podcasting figured out, along comes DTV from the Participatory Culture Foundation. DTV, an acronym I have yet to find defined anywhere but I suspect stands for “Distributed TV,” is a system that mirrors podcasting almost perfectly. If podcasting has led to a democratization of radio, then DTV does the same for television.

The Participatory Culture Foundation, a new non-profit based in Massachusetts, believes (from their press page) that “Internet TV should be open-source and based on open standards, just like blogging and podcasting. We’re working to ensure that the new mass medium of internet TV is free, accessible to all, and built with independent voices.” Their partner list is pretty impressive already featuring, among others, former Vice-President Gore’s new cable TV channel Current TV.

DTV uses RSS enclosures just like podcasts, but downloads and plays video content within the DTV player. Not unlike Apple’s iTunes, DTV has a channel browser built in and allows you to subscribe to particular channels for automatic download later. The secret sauce here is BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing system that facilitates the download of huge files without blowing any one server out of the water. The BitTorrent technology is crucial because the size of video files makes it impossible for the average person to host any substantial files on a hosted server account. The bandwidth costs would be enormous. BitTorrent spreads the load among all users who are downloading and, theoretically, would allow almost anyone to create and host these files.

The DTV folks are also developing software that will help users publish video online. Their software, Broadcast Machine, looks a lot like standard blogging tools and will automate the process of creating the necessary BitTorrent files and will help manage multiple channels.

This is pretty exciting. The use of BitTorrent (and there’s really no other way to do this) will make it difficult for companies like Apple to jump in because their legal departments will have group coronaries at the thought of building BitTorrent into their software. But everyone thinks that Apple has a video iPod on way, and if they do it will take no time at all to add the ability to transfer files to the iPod from the DTV application. Then Apple will be able to keep its corporate hands clean while cementing their position as the mobile device of choice for audio and (maybe) video.

So in the meantime, take every application you can think of for podcasting and imagine how it would work with video.