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

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

using

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...

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

History

A broadcatcher was originally a term created in the 1920s for someone who listened in to radio broadcasts, as the winner in a competition run by The Daily News paper in Britain, published on 16 February 1923. 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 Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American project developer and writer, best known as the co-founder and editor of the ''Whole Earth Catalog''. He has founded a number of organizations, including the WELL, the Global Business Networ ...

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 Steve is a masculine given name, usually a short form (hypocorism) of Steven or Stephen. Notable people A–D * Steve Abbott (disambiguation), several people * Steve Abel (born 1970), New Zealand politician * Steve Adams (disambiguation), ...

described combining

and

BitTorrent BitTorrent is a Protocol (computing), communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a Decentralised system, decentralized manner. The protocol is d ...

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 films and television show, television series, Streaming media, streamed over the Internet. Standing in contrast to dedicated terrestrial television delivered by Broadc ...

and

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

(also called

podcast A podcast is a Radio program, program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. Typically, a podcast is an Episode, episodic series of digital audio Computer file, files that users can download to a personal device or str ...

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

multicast In computer networking, multicast is a type of 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 differs from ph ...

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 de ...

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

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

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 Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the 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, the mini-major Amazon MGM Studios, as well as the video streaming services Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. F ...

and

RIAA The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trade organization that represents the music recording industry in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors that the RIAA says "create, manufacture, and/o ...

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 * 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 or Le Déluge may also refer to: History *Deluge (history), the Swedish and Russian invasion of the Polish-L ...

* KTorrent *

qBittorrent qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client written in native application, native C++. It relies on Boost (C++ libraries), Boost, OpenSSL, zlib, Qt (software), Qt 6 toolkit and the libtorrent-rasterbar library (for th ...

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 inte ...

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 do ...

μTorrent μTorrent, or uTorrent (see pronunciation), is a proprietary adware BitTorrent client owned and developed by Rainberry, Inc. The " μ" (Greek letter " mu") in its name comes from the SI prefix "micro-", referring to the program's small memo ...

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 *

References

External links

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