BitTorrent Live P2P broadcasting protocol now open beta

The makers of the popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol BitTorrent have made the company's Live broadcast service available to everyone.

Designed to lower barriers of entry for broadcasters by lowering bandwidth and infrastructure costs through peers pooling network resources with each other, BitTorrent Live streams work better the more people that use it, the company claims.

BitTorrent founder and developer Bram Cohen sids Live has demonstranted scalability and stability during the early trial phase and is now open to anyone who wants to use it.

So far, no large Internet broadcaster such as Netflix has come onboard with BitTorrent Live, which mainly displays music videos currently.

The streaming service has been in a closed beta trial with broadcasters since November last year and works in a similar fashion to the Bittorrent peer-to-peer filesharing protocol.

It uses UDP for data transmission and encodes video in H.264 format with the AAC codec utilised for audio.

BitTorrent as a file sharing protocol has courted controversy thanks to it being used to disseminate copyrighted material such as movies and music recordings.

Police raids have taken place against Torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and content producers have also tracked and sued file sharers themselves.

Unauthorised streaming of televised events is also becoming more common. In August last year, BBC reported that the UK Premier League football union shut down over 30,000 illegal streams of games, calling it a "significant problem".