LiveStation and Silverlight deliver Live TV to your PC

LiveStation built on Silverlight brings Live TV to your PC. LiveStation is a project, currently in controlled beta, that uses technology from Microsoft and Skinkers, a UK based company. LiveStation currently rebroadcasts the BBC live, but could be expanded to other TV stations. LiveStation is delivered on Microsoft's Silverlight with extraordinary quality and crispness. The video is like watching a DVD on your PC...no jerky motion, no buffering...it is just like watching live TV.

TechMeme has several stories on LiveStation.

What is different? There have been several ways to watch TV on your PC, so what is different here?

• LiveStation uses Peer-to-Peer technology to distribute the TV signal, so it doesn't require a big server infrastructure and lots of bandwidth. The P2P technology was developed at Microsoft's Cambridge research lab and functions similar to BitTorrent.
• Silverlight allows the video to be displayed in very high quality, and with amazing speed. Silverlight was unveiled at MIX07 earlier this year to rave reviews. LiveStation shows off the power and elegance of Silverlight.
• Live TV, this isn't recorded TV being re-broadcast...it is live, without delay. Of course the technology could be modified to stream recorded shows or other types of content.
• TV on your cell phone? Silverlight runs on cell phones, so in the future LiveStation could deliver Live TV directly to your cell phone or mobile device.

LiveStation is built on two research technologies, Pastry and SplitStream, from Microsoft's Cambridge Research Lab. Pastry is a type of P2P system called a 'distributed hash table,' which makes it easier for computers to find and store information, and to organize themselves for collaborative tasks. Splitstream is an application built on top of Pastry which allows real-time streams such as live video to be robustly distributed peer-to-peer.

LiveStation is currently in a controlled beta. You can register for the beta here. Tell them Don Dodge from Microsoft referred you to the beta. I registered and got accepted within a few minutes. But hurry, it is unclear when they will cut off the beta. Presumably there will be an open beta later this year.

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Comments

[Johnny Fry]

Don,

Is this using MS's Avalanche technology?

Based on the evidence:

http://research.microsoft.com/~pablo/
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050616-5005.html

It looks like Pablo works at the Cambridge R&D office. This is really great, I'd love to get some kind of client library for working with MS's Avalanche tech.

[steve]

Hi, good post. I just finished my own LiveStation review.
http://www.last100.com/2007/07/06/review-livestation-more-live-tv-on-your-pc/

[coolblueskies]

I hope you will speak to this while you visit Boulder next week.

DL

[Alex]

I think this is a great technology and, being a Microsoft developer, I'm glad to see some more applications on the Silverlight platform. It is a very good platform.

Hopefully there will be more beta slots opening up so I can demo it!

[Madu Alikor]

How is the Per 2 Per in Live Station implemented exactly from the documentation silverlight is now able to make cross domain calls so how on earth are you able to make a p2p network?