NextshareTV: P2P Streaming, Tagging and Sharing

The European P2P Next consortium launched a set-top box prototype that allows P2P streaming at the IBC conference in Amsterdam today. The place of birth for NextshareTV, as the prototype is called, is the Pioneer Digital Design Centre in London.

A month ago we reported that Vatata was going to make its distributed streaming video service also available on set-top boxes. Also, Vudu delivers content to its boxes through progressive P2P downloads, so this is becoming a trend. What brings an extra edge to NextshareTV is the addition of social elements, allowing its users to tag and share content.

According to Torrentfreak , the device is based on a 266MHz processor with 128 MB of RAM.

NextshareTV employs some of the open-source P2P streaming technology of the Swarm Player, which came into existence through P2P Next project in July.

The press release makes reference to the Nextshare platform, which appears to be the software running on this box. The developers intended Nextshare for set top boxes as well as computers, and there’s a “large-scale technical trial” of the system with “a wide variety of users, from local students to rural villagers” in work from researchers at the Lancaster University.