• Integrate more cycling into my habits.
• Find out if I have the capacity to start my own software company.

Taking the cycling first, I haven’t much. Indeed, I cycle as infrequently as when I had a full time job. An early start has fizzled out, and my main activity has been to watch this year’s Tour de France. However, I got a nice new cycle computer for my birthday last week, so perhaps the trick of ‘new equipment’ will get me going (it has worked in the past).

On the software company front, I have made more progress, although I don’t claim to have a going concern yet! I have formed Transmission Begins, and developed its first product, My Own TV Channel. This is now just starting to be used by people other than me. It’s well received whenever I discuss it, so my current plan is to improve it somewhat and then focus on building a service business around it. The software itself is available for download with an open-source licence.

Apologies to those of you who don’t know a speaker of a little known language, ook. Clearly there is a sufferer in Grantham.

No pixels were photoshopped in the creation of this post.

Curious, I started looking around. Most of the bittorrent software I could find was limited in some awkward way - perhaps implemented in a less popular language, or designed to handle the needs of the high traffic pirate content servers rather than small providers of their own content. Two services stood out: Amazon’s S3 service lets you turn any hosted file into a torrent by adding the ‘.torrent’ extension to its URL, and the Miro Team’s Broadcast Machine did all the torrent generation server side, on your own server.

However, Broadcast Machine is no longer supported, and S3 leaves you needing to create an RSS feed. I’ve therefore been busy implementing a bittorrent server that can be hosted at any domain that supports PHP and MySQL. If you can install Wordpress, I intend this software to work too. It can create a .torrent for any file already on your server, and then include it in an RSS based channel feed, ideal for clients like Miro.

I’m looking for a few beta testers to see if this software works outside of my own test set up. If you want to host some video content (perhaps you already post them to youtube) on your own domain, and you are familiar with installing software like Wordpress there, you would be an ideal candidate. It would also be useful to see how multiple downloads work, so if you already use a torrent aware RSS reader (Miro is one), or would like to, please get in touch.

Feel free to email me (john@mcaleely.com), or post a response to this blog entry.

Incidentally, selling this software is not my business idea. This is BSD licensed open source.

So, its off to eBay with some of them:

• A netBook
• A Revo
• A Series 5
• The PC Card adaptor for the Series 5

If you fancy buying one, you could always install some of my software!

Miro eliminates all these gripes, and I’ve been impressed by the experience of using Miro on my TV over the last six months or so. I’ve tried to write up some of the reasons from a professional perspective over the last few blog entries: Miro respects my own honesty; respects the authoring effort of the people who create video; allows people to publish at low cost and is easy to understand and use.

There’s another reason I like it though - it has become easy for me to download and watch some really high quality video on my TV I wouldn’t see elsewhere. Right now, Miro claims to have more HD content than similar competitors, and it looks great!

I’ve not seen a better way to watch video on the internet.

While it is running, Miro is capable of downloading in the background without impacting the playing video. Therefore it’s often my experience that once I’ve watched one video in a channel, the next has downloaded. By leaving Miro running on the computer attached to my TV, there are also always downlaods that have completed while I’m away. As such, whenever I want to watch channels in Miro, there is something to view. In practice, this means that when I encounter a new channel, I hit the subscribe button, anticipating I will be able to watch it next time I sit in front of the TV.

As an aside, downloading before viewing has another advantage - playback is far more reliable. Most of the internet live feeds I’ve used experience breakup and dropout, making them unpleasant to watch. Miro never suffers from this, which is great.

Whilst I’m generally sceptical about copying the user experience from traditional TV’s and HiFi’s, the channel as blog metaphor seems to work well for Miro.

There are several possible solutions to this:

• Multicast IP
• Hosting on multiple servers via Mirroring or a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Collaborative (peer-to-peer) downloading

Multicast IP allows the server to share a connection among many clients, but for various reasons is not available on the public internet so needs to be discounted. Hosting on multiple servers is straightforward, but is costly and out of reach of individual authors.

Collaborative downloading allows the author to require each viewer to also act as a server for that file. In this way an ad-hoc multiple server system can be created, with costs split between the author and each viewer. Whether your viewers will be happy with this probably depends on what you charge them, and what they get in return. Most pay-per-month internet connections allow them to make a useful server contribution at no direct financial cost to them.

A popular collaborative download protocol is BitTorrent, which is included in Miro. An author distributing video to Miro (or similar) viewers can therefore choose whether to deploy multiple servers, or rely on viewers to collaborate as downloads occur. The ability to broadcast without investing in a network of servers should make it materially easier to distribute video from small providers on the internet, in a similar way that blogging has brought publishing words within an individuals reach.