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Imagine combining BitTorrent and streaming audio. Instead of a web host and mirrors serving up streaming audio content at their expense, each listener of the audio becomes a potential server for it.
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There's a new idea gaining momentum in the newsgroups, soon to be on SourceForge, regarding streaming audio. The concept is simple and solves a bandwidth (and thus, cost) problem that website owners face that prevents them from easily serving up audio on their website.
Currently streaming audio must be served up by a web host and/or a small army of mirrors. But imagine if fans of that audio content could end up becoming their own mirrors of that content while they listen to it at the same time. As the popularity of your audio content grows, and your fan base increases, so does your bandwidth potential, exponentially, using the power of P2P programming.
A special helper app would be required for the content, and the helper app would automatically not make the user as a server for the content if they were on dial-up, did not have the bandwidth to support at least an extra audio stream, or had opted out with a dialog box setting or command-line switch.
The technology could revolutionize the way we think of audio on the web, using technology that is accessible today. And the next stop could become live video and screen replay so that businesses and universities could perform massively scalable webinars. News and other types of Internet radio shows could now perform their shows with less cost. Startup companies could now demonstrate their software or sales presentations inexpensively without large website costs.
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