Eurovision Song Contest coming live to your PC, courtesy of €19M EU grant

Development grant

P2P-Next, a pan-European conglomerate of 22 industrial partners, media content providers and research institutions was awarded a €19 million grant from the European Union to identify the potential uses of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology for internet television.

The partners including the BBC, Delft University of Technology, the European Broadcasting Union, Lancaster University, Markenfilm, Pioneer and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, intend to develop a Europe-wide next-generation internet television distribution system, based on P2P and social interaction.

The P2P-Next project will run over two years, and plans to conduct a large-scale technical trial of new media applications running on a wide range of consumer devices. If successful, this project could create a platform that would enable audiences to stream and interact with live content via a PC or set top box.

In addition, it is intended to allow audiences to build communities around their favourite content. The technology could potentially be built into video on demand services in the future and plans are underway to test the system for broadcasting the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest live online.

All core software technology will be available as open source, enabling new business models. P2P-Next will also address a number of outstanding challenges related to content delivery over the internet, including technical, legal, regulatory, security, business and commercial issues.

P2P provides an alternative to the traditional client/server architecture of computer networks. While employing the existing broadband networks, each participating computer, referred to as peer, functions as both a client and a server for a given application. Thus P2P networks enables the sharing of content files or streams with audio, video and data content.