I’ve discovered a few more swarm streamers for broadcasting multimedia to potentially millions of viewers: Coolstream, PPLive, and SopCast.
SopCast seems promising as it has a contributed Linux interface for the SopCast player, called (duh) sopcast-player. I’m still trying to figure out how to “broadcast” with this system, whether from Linux or Windows.
Coolstream looks interesting but not yet fully-baked. The website keeps insisting I log in, and none of the supposedly-active video streams appear to be working for me.
PPLive appears to have active users, but the channels using it as listed on the PPLive iKan site are all in Chinese. The other channel listing site, PP.tv, is also in Chinese. Clicking around seems promising but it’s hard to know what I’m looking at. And some of the clips seem to be blocked here.
There’s another service called TV Ants but the company’s website isn’t coming up for me. That is one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a channel with one of these groups. In order for any of this to work, you need to have at least one server to help seed the stream. If the company hosting your channel goes out of business then all of the channels that company hosts vanish as well.