MANILA, Philippines – The ability to continuously deliver multimedia to a user, known as livestreaming, is currently hampered by one’s latency and the number of people viewing a multimedia stream. The folks behind BitTorrent, however, are beta testing a new development that could potentially democratize the technology for streaming content.

Called BitTorrent Live, the service is supposed to work much like BitTorrent technology, with the reliability of a connection improving the more people tune in to a livestream. According to their website, each new viewer become a miniature broadcaster, amplifying the broadcast across the Internet. 

BitTorrent Inc.’s Justin Knoll told torrenting website TorrentFreak, “It’s based on the principles of the BitTorrent protocol. And it’s designed to make real-time reporting, and open expression available to all: eliminating bandwidth, cost, and infrastructure as broadcast barriers.”

Knoll said the service is “designed from scratch as the perfect means of sharing events to the masses in real-time and with low latencies, but without the astronomical bandwidth requirements that traditionally constrain content creators.”

Prospective viewers are required to install the BitTorrent Live app to share the stream with other viewers. Those who want to stream content can make accounts on the site, though they may need some knowledge of video streaming to begin with, as TorrentFreak notes that “the service requires a computer as a broadcast station.” – Rappler.com