In our last lecture, we talked about the internet as an information network built to function in a manner similar to natural thought (as laid out in Vanevar Bush’s As We May Think). This would seem to be an extremely logical way to order data, yet there are many systems that defy this natural order. One, for instance, is television. With the rise of YouTube, video data has achieved a slightly more neural-network style progression with the advent of “related videos”, but television in general is ordered by stations with shows appearing when the stations say they should, not when the user wants them to.

However (as reported here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7259339.stm), it appears as though this could be about to change, at least in Europe to start. The European Union has decided to embrace the technology of peer to peer file sharing to create a peer to peer TV network. This technology is perfect for creating the system of TV for the same reason it is so popular in the illegal file sharing underground: very few servers are required to store and serve the information. In the traditional server/client relation, the server must send content to any client requesting it, creating a directed graph with one node pointing to others. In the case of TV, this graph would be very lopsided as one server (a TV station) would point to millions and millions of clients (viewers).

Peer to peer solves this problem by making everyone a server for everyone else, eliminating the one sided nature of the classical internet map when applied to TV. The system works with peer to peer technologies for things like that, but it will also incorporate live feeds for things like sports events – essentially replacing all of TV with the internet. If this becomes widespread, perhaps we could see the evolution of TV sometime in the immediate future.