Broadcatching is the downloading of digital content that has been made available over the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

using RSS. The general idea is to use an automated mechanism to aggregate various web feeds and download content for viewing or presentation purposes.

History

Fen Labalme describes coining the term 'broadcatch' in 1983. It refers to an automated agent that aggregates and filters content from multiple sources for presentation to an individual user. Stewart Brand later used the term independently in his 1987 book ''The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT'' to describe artificial-intelligence technology (in one application) to assist content selection ('hunting') and viewing ('grazing' or 'browsing').

RSS+BitTorrent

In December 2003 Steve Gillmor described combining RSS and BitTorrent

peer-to-peer file sharing Peer-to-peer file sharing is the distribution and sharing of digital media using peer-to-peer (P2P) networking technology. P2P file sharing allows users to access media files such as books, music, movies, and games using a P2P software program th ...

as a method for subscribing to an ongoing series of media files, in an article for Ziff-Davis. Scott Raymond described its specific application for gathering scheduled programming in an article entitled ''Broadcatching with BitTorrent''. The combination of these technologies allows a computer connected to the Internet to act like a digital video recorder (DVR) such as TiVo connected to cable. One of the first practical implementations was released in 2004. Programmer Andrew Grumet announced the release of a beta version of an RSS and BitTorrent integration tool for the Radio Userland news aggregato
here
Today, content can be delivered to large groups at low cost through RSS-and-BitTorrent-based broadcatching. Large groups can be notified of new content through RSS, and bulky content can be distributed inexpensively through BitTorrent. Recipients subscribe to an ''RSS feed'' through which a content provider notifies recipients' software of new content, and that software uses BitTorrent to retrieve the content. Tags, be they applied by one user or many users, are also used to topically drive syndication of torrents.

Uses

Although broadcatching can be classified as a method independent of technology and implementation, today broadcatching finds much use with

Internet television Streaming television is the digital distribution of television content, such as TV shows, as streaming media delivered over the Internet. Streaming television stands in contrast to dedicated terrestrial television delivered by over-the-air a ...

and

Internet radio Online radio (also web radio, net radio, streaming radio, e-radio, IP radio, Internet radio) is a digital audio service transmitted via the Internet. Broadcasting on the Internet is usually referred to as webcasting since it is not transmitted ...

(also called

podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosin ...

ing or IPradio). Broadcatching is often used in situations where

multicast In computer networking, multicast is group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast should not be confused with ...

ing may be used but is cost prohibitive.

Broadcatching television broadcasts

Perhaps the most popular use of broadcatching is using a BitTorrent client with inbuilt RSS support to automatically download television episodes as they are 'released'—internet users capture the broadcast as it is transmitted, then

transcode Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video data files, audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target dev ...

it (typically after removing advertisements) and send it on to others. The practice has become quite popular, particularly in countries such as Australia and the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

where television programs produced in the US tend to be aired more than six months after US broadcasts, if at all. , there has been no legal action taken against sharers of TV episodes (compared to distribution of copyrighted movies and music which the

MPAA The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is an American trade association representing the five major film studios of the United States, as well as the video streaming service Netflix. Founded in 1922 as the Motion Picture Producers and Distribu ...

and RIAA have taken a strong stance against).

Measurement Study

Zhang ''et al.'' have evaluated Broadcatching using PlanetLab testbed in 2008. About 200 PlanetLab nodes all over the world were used in their study. Their results have demonstrated Broadcatching can greatly improve the performance of the BitTorrent system. Through this mechanism, every node is able to complete the file downing much faster.

Clients

BitLord BitLord is a proprietary adware BitTorrent client available for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Android. It is advertised as, and largely reviewed as, one of the easiest BitTorrent applications to use. With a built-in search engine, video player w ...

* BitTorrent 6 *

Deluge A deluge is a large downpour of rain, often a flood. The Deluge refers to the flood narrative in the Biblical book of Genesis. Deluge may also refer to: History *Deluge (history), the Swedish and Russian invasion of the Polish-Lithuanian Com ...

KTorrent KTorrent is a BitTorrent client that is part of the KDE Gear. Features KTorrent is often received as a client intended to be feature rich. Features include: *Upload and download speed capping / throttling & scheduling *Internet searching with ...

qBittorrent qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client written in native C++. It relies on Boost, Qt 6 toolkit and the libtorrent-rasterbar library (for the torrent back-end), with an optional search engine written in Python. ...

Tixati Tixati is a proprietary Linux and Windows BitTorrent client written in C++. It has standalone and portable versions with each new client version. Features In addition to standard BitTorrent client-sharing functions, Tixati provides integral ...

Tixati.com - Home
/ref> * Torrent Swapper * TorrentFlux *

Tribler Tribler is an open source decentralized BitTorrent client which allows anonymous peer-to-peer by default. Tribler is based on the BitTorrent protocol and uses an overlay network for content searching. Due to this overlay network, Tribler doe ...

* μTorrent *

Vuze Vuze (previously Azureus) is a BitTorrent client used to transfer files via the BitTorrent protocol. Vuze is written in Java, and uses the Azureus Engine. In addition to downloading data linked to .torrent files, Azureus allows users to view, p ...

* ZyXEL Network Storage Appliance (NSA) series: NSA210 / NSA310 / NSA-220 PLUS / NSA221 / NSA320

Players with broadcatching functions

* Miro * μTorrent

References

External links

Broadcatching, March 6, 2004Broadcatching Audio RSS Feeds
{{Aggregators * File sharing RSS BitTorrent