Unlike television transmission standard has a limited number of viewers that the television stations over the Internet can accommodate. These limits are determined by the amount of bandwidth the network media server is available. A popular TV channel on the Internet requires large amounts of bandwidth to provide the broadcast to a large viewing audience video broadcasting.

Peer to Peer (commonly known as P2P) allows viewers to spread the use of specialized software to re-distribute the broadcast media. This eliminates the need for costly centralized media servers to distribute television and results in cost savings for the consumption of bandwidth.

Companies of any size, or group can establish an effective media broadcast presence without the huge costs normally associated with the Internet. Using this method, only a few data streams needed a global distribution of Internet delivery.

P2P Internet broadcasting provides results of bandwidth extremely friendly and can support a virtually unlimited number of users. This method also provides effective security against Denial of Service (DoS) attacks that can cripple a centralized server network architecture.

There are both commercial and non commercial options that offer the ability to send P2P TV on the Internet.

This article will focus on open source free software.

Open source is an initiative that allows people to access the software source code. This is the real nuts and bolts to allow the software to function. This initiative also allows people to redistribute and or modify the source code so that improvements and adaptations of the software.

Peercast

PeerCast is a P2P application that broadcast media is available for Windows, Unix and Macintosh operating systems. It 'compatible with Shoutcast, Icecast and Windows Media streaming protocols.

The software was originally designed to use Gnutella as a basis for broadcast distribution. The software now uses a hierarchical topology for the distribution of audiovisual media. This new method provides greater scalability and more data organization.

The station data is collected by the YP directory. This data is constantly updated by individual broadcasters. Listeners / viewers (client software) to the points of connection between them, broadcasters and others.

Each carrier is also the possibility of a digital signature to authenticate video broadcasting media. This will prevent their broadcasts have been kidnapped and replaced by alternative materials.

Video codecs Peercast supports the following: VP3, VP6, Theora and WMV. Can also be used for radio and can be configured to use multiple audio codecs. The software can be used to transmit the individual files of static media as well.

Hardware network routers use Network Address Translation to provide internal IP addresses of computers within the network. The traffic through the NAT must be converted from internal IP addresses to external IP addresses. The P2P traffic routing through NAT usually requires software port transfer to bypass NAT. Cast peer is NAT friendly software requires no special port forwarding.