Audio Video News

What's the best way to get super-high-res HD movies to your neighborhood moviehouse? An experiment in Norway suggests an unlikely answer: BitTorrent.

In a recent test, the Far North Living Lab used the EU-funded Tribler torrent client to stream a movie at 2K resolution with a data rate of 19MBps. The movie was Carved by Jonas Rejman. This BitTorrent premiere had the permission of the copyright owner.

Torrent technology offers a cheaper way to get indie movies to the big screen without the need for snail-mailing a hard disk--though how torrent distribution could be made secure enough to satisfy Hollywood remains to be seen.

This was not an ordinary torrent. The experimenters seeded it with their own computers. However, upgrading the theater's connection to a one-gigabyte fiber optic cable may allow future experiments with no local seeds.

The next experiment will be to stream a live concert to Beijing and rural areas in China.

See TorrentFreak.