It is finally here – Peer to Peer TV known as PPLive.

One of the biggest challenges in traditional IPTV is how to distribute to hundreds of thousand or millions of viewer at the same time (imaging “broadcasting” HDTV to 500,000 people @ 400-600kbps unicast stream and you’ll understand the bandwidth challenge). Multicast works but few ISPs support multicast streams not to mention lack of QoS.

Using P2P technology will overcome this – as you are watching live TV streams downloaded via your peers, you are also streaming to others on the network. Sure, there is a bit of time delay in getting your TV and sure, the QoS is not certain but (1) a few seconds delay is more than acceptable in broadcast TV and (2) experience using PPLive so far give very high quality TV as long as you have sufficient bandwidth. This would be the good time to upgrade to the 10mbps broadband you wanted but have no idea what’s do with extra bandwidth :-)

Back to PPLive, it is a software from China and currently, it supports 80-90 channels mostly broadcast from China. And for those who can’t read Chinese, here is the direct download link. Don’t worry, the software supports English :-)

Have fun. Just make sure upgrade your broadband :-)