UT students have created a peer-to-peer streaming program that will make it possible for anyone with a computer and server space to run their own Internet TV channel.
ACTLab TV is based on a program called Alluvium, which combines swarming technology and streaming technology to play videos and music. The swarming technology is similar to the what the popular downloading program BitTorrent uses. Unlike BitTorent's swarming technology which breaks and downloads bits and pieces of a large file in random order, Alluvium downloads all the pieces in order, said Alluvium creator Brandon Wiley. This makes it possible to simultaneously watch the file and download a file, while BitTorrent users must wait until an entire file is completely downloaded.
The ACTLab TV concept was born last fall when radio-television-film graduate students Wiley and Joe Lopez were sifting through ACTLab projects. ACTLab is a small division within the RTF department that requires students to put their film projects online in individual Web sites.
"When we looked through previous projects, we discovered that we had over 1,400 Web sites," Wiley said.
All the Web sites amounted to more than 1,000 hours of video and music - hours and hours of content in a very frustrating way to view, Lopez said.
"There's all this great stuff on the Web, but unless you're on it all the time like us, you can't find it," Lopez said.
The team also has other sources for entertainment, including a collection of ACTLab video tapes from as far back as 1992 and media from students and professors in the RTF industry who were interested in submitting work, Lopez said.
Though Wiley and Lopez came up with the idea last year, they didn't act on it until this summer. For the past two weeks, Wiley, Lopez and undergraduate interns Robert Francher and Randy Kelley, have each spent 40 hours a week working, testing the program and digitizing old videotapes. The ACTLab TV Web site went online Monday, but users will not be able to watch anything through the program until June 20, when the actual client and a small five-minute demo will be released.
"We just want to make sure that we have all the proper documentation about how to use the program and how to set up a stream before we release everything," Lopez said.
The team is proceeding cautiously and will release something new about every two weeks for the next few months. By the end of summer, the site will stream content 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and people will be able to run their own programing.
In the future, users will be able to create their own ACTLab TV playlists for broadcasting on the Internet or for personal use by adding Internet addresses into the playlist.
For example, a user will be able to watch all the videos on Archive.org continuously if they enter in all the addresses individually, Wiley said.
Although ACTLab TV headquarters are in the Communications building, the group receives no funding from the University and has no plans to seek funding or sponsorship in the future.
"When Randy asked me what our budget was at the beginning, I asked him how much money he had in his pockets," Lopez laughed.
Lack of funding for the project goes hand in hand with the idea of low-budget promotions for independent media, Wiley said. As RTF students themselves, the team said they were aware of how difficult it is to break into the film and music industries and distribute work.
"This program was largely created to distribute and promote independent media," Wiley said.
The group's Web site received more than 100,000 hits after the project was cited on Slashdot.org, which itself as "news for nerds."
Although critics on the site doubt the group's ability to create a program that is good both technologically and visually, Lopez said ACTLab TV will bring the geeks of online streaming and the artists of the media industry together.
"One of the great things that ACTLab TV is its simplicity so that people not into technology can create their own streams," Lopez said.
The group will not play anything that is copyrighted, only independent artists and videos.
"Our agenda is to help indie media," Wiley said. "We don't want to distribute copyrighted material."
As artists themselves, group members said they had no intention of encouraging piracy when they created ACTLab TV, although it will be possible to stream illegal media through ACTLab TV.
"This is what I chose to do with my summer vacation. Some people went to Europe. I said 'Hey, let's run an Internet TV,'" Wiley said.
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