Just a few weeks ago the Copyright Office came down with a decision about the amount webcasters should pay in royalties for streaming Internet radio. Typically, the decision satisfied no one – the recording industry thinks 0.07 cents per song per performance is way too low, while many webcasters counter that even that low fee will bankrupt them, leaving the recording industry with no one to collect royalties from.
Possibly rendering this entire debate moot is a new software program called Peercast, an open source, peer-to-peer software client for streaming any kind of media over the web.
From the site:
PeerCast offers considerable bandwidth savings for broadcasters because they do not have to provide bandwidth for all of their listeners. A single 56K modem can broadcast to the entire network.
PeerCast uses the Gnutella protocol as the basis for all communications, and complies (mostly) to the Gnutella 0.6 protocol. It works in much the same way as other Gnutella clients except instead of downloading files, the users download streams. These streams are exchanged in real-time with other users.
PeerCast is a robust network because there is no central server, each user can be a client, server or broadcaster of streams. It offers anonymity for broadcasters because there is no easy way to trace back to the original stream, it is even possible to broadcast directly to a single client located in a different country and have that provide the source for the entire network.
