Bob Ross is the only thing good on right now but I do have to say that while the quality isn't the best the stream performance is really nice and stable. Works great.
> What channels can I watch?
Puffer re-transmits free over-the-air broadcast television signals received by an antenna located on the campus of Stanford University.
Is this legal? Aereo [0] had to shut down because broadcasters sued them for streaming OTA TV signals, which went all the way to the Supreme Court where they lost. Aereo even had an antennae per customer.
Wow, that's really interesting. You would think this wouldn't be okay with channels because it's still depriving them of cable retransmission fees. Looks like they just got a $500,000 donation from AT&T.
AT&T has more to gain than lose by this being successful, since they pay out billions in retransmission fees. They're already playing hardball on retransmission agreements recently, with the current CBS blackout being only the latest example[1].
AT&T added Locast to both their DirecTV and Uverse TV receivers[2], which limits the impact radius of the blackouts that are resulting from their strong-arm tactics. And in the case of DirectTV's receiver, it's a pretty seemless process as the blacked-out channels in the guide automatically redirect you to the equivalent channel in the Locast app.
A $500k donation for such convenient leverage is chump change, considering the billions of dollars that are on the line with these retransmission agreements.
Incidentally, crypto exchanges in the past (and one very recently, known as Bitmex) have faced issues with US authorities regarding this. Context: US citizens cannot trade unless the exchange is US-licensed.
Essentially, US gov applied pressure such that a simple tick box (to prove you are not American) is not sufficient. So, authorities definitely have precedent to enforce geo-constraints, it's just a matter of "do they care".
The project has been funded in part by the NSF and DARPA, along with support from Google, Huawei, VMware, Dropbox, Facebook, and the Stanford Platform Lab.
I'm in their target market. No broadcast TV available where I live.
The stream works for a few seconds after clicking a channel but then freeze on all the channels.. The sound continued to work on all the channels though.
I suspect this may have something to do with with it being designed for testing with 500 users, number of HN users here clicking the link.
I'll try again later after things settle down.
Debug Info:
Video playback buffer (s): 14.6
Video resolution: 1920x1080
Video encoding setting (CRF): 22
Video quality (SSIM dB): 17.49
Video bitrate (kbps): 6210.93
Watching a rodeo on CBS right now, I see the video bitrate ranging from around 500kbps to over 20 Mbps. The bitrate does not seem to correlate with anything visible to me, such as the amount of motion in the picture or the video quality.
20mbps is raw DTV over the air, that is how much bandwidth my tuner detects while watching tv from my HDHomerun. When I encode using plex or something similar, my bandwidth can get as low as 500kbps but usually averages 1mbps. Below 500 and artifacts become noticeable. When I increase cpu for x264 encoding, I can get 384kbps comfortably (at the expense of superheating that box)
The most interesting part about this (which they don't mention on the homepage) is that they are collecting data which they use to retrain a neural neural network that predicts transmission time. This neural network and a predictive model are paired to do things like adaptive bitrate selection and congestion control. They even retrain the model every day based on the past day's data.
This approach apparently performs better than using just a predictive model or just a neural network without any explicit model at all.
They also say they plan to open this up to other research and that they will continue running the site for a couple of years.
> For the research project to work, we need some source of video that never ends and is sufficiently interesting to attract a few hundred people to watch. Broadcast TV is the most interesting thing that we have access to and are permitted to retransmit.
The most interesting thing about this experiment is that the most interesting thing that a research group at a top tier University finds to retransmit are Broadcast TV channels.
59 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 84.0 ms ] thread...sure I do
Is this legal? Aereo [0] had to shut down because broadcasters sued them for streaming OTA TV signals, which went all the way to the Supreme Court where they lost. Aereo even had an antennae per customer.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo
If it's not for profit and geoconstrained, yes.
https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/nonprofit-launches-ny...
https://www.locast.org/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/streaming-service-challenges-br...
AT&T added Locast to both their DirecTV and Uverse TV receivers[2], which limits the impact radius of the blackouts that are resulting from their strong-arm tactics. And in the case of DirectTV's receiver, it's a pretty seemless process as the blacked-out channels in the guide automatically redirect you to the equivalent channel in the Locast app.
A $500k donation for such convenient leverage is chump change, considering the billions of dollars that are on the line with these retransmission agreements.
[1] https://deadline.com/2019/07/cbs-blackout-directv-u-verse-at...
[2] https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/at-t-locast-is-option...
Essentially, US gov applied pressure such that a simple tick box (to prove you are not American) is not sufficient. So, authorities definitely have precedent to enforce geo-constraints, it's just a matter of "do they care".
The video quality is really amazing.
Our study benefits, in part, from a law that allows nonprofit organizations to retransmit over-the-air television signals without charge.
Let's take bets how long before it's gone.
https://www.locast.org/
Would it be possible to be able to manually set the resolution of the videos ? Full HD will burn my 4G quota
Kudos to whoever's making this happen, I'd love to see this kind of speed come to both commercial services and services like Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin
The stream works for a few seconds after clicking a channel but then freeze on all the channels.. The sound continued to work on all the channels though.
I suspect this may have something to do with with it being designed for testing with 500 users, number of HN users here clicking the link.
I'll try again later after things settle down.
Debug Info:
Video playback buffer (s): 14.6 Video resolution: 1920x1080 Video encoding setting (CRF): 22 Video quality (SSIM dB): 17.49 Video bitrate (kbps): 6210.93
https://puffer.stanford.edu/terms/
This approach apparently performs better than using just a predictive model or just a neural network without any explicit model at all.
They also say they plan to open this up to other research and that they will continue running the site for a couple of years.
The most interesting thing about this experiment is that the most interesting thing that a research group at a top tier University finds to retransmit are Broadcast TV channels.