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Lanovision Streaming video client and an interview with its creator

There's a new P2P video streaming client called Lanovision.  It works much the same ways that iTunes shared music libraries work, where you can view everyone's stuff on your network, but only for video. If you have videos on your desktop, you could stream them onto a laptop that was plugged into your TV and it also works great for sharing video in the college dorm. Yale Daily News has an article about it and the creator, Patrick Fitzsimmons, was kind enough to answer a few questions I had for him.

Matt Haughey, PVRblog: Lanovision sounds like a great idea, especially for a college campus. What's uptake been like at Yale? When you pop open Lanovision, how many servers do you see?

Patrick Fitzsimmons, Lanovision: So far there are a couple of dorm networks that are going strong, though not everyone knows about Lanovision yet, and some networks haven't hit critical mass.  People on the strong dorm networks love the program.  I've gotten emails such as, "This program is absolutely rediculous. I'm going to fail out of school because of you. Asshole." or "I just wanted to congratulate you on lanovision, which is, without doubt, the dopest thing that has ever happened to my suite."

On my medium-sized dorm network, there is an average of around 13 servers sharing about 150 gigabytes of video.

MH: I noticed that the program focuses on streaming, was that primarily to skirt issues that copyright holders might have on video file trading? Does it work well enough without having much ability to fast forward or rewind?

PF: Lanovision focuses on streaming for two reasons.  First, so that people can watch video instantly without waiting for long download times or using up hard drive space.  Second, to avoid copyright issues.  Just as iTunes music sharing tries to be the digital equivalent of listening to your friends music, Lanovision tries to be the digital equivalent of borrowing a friends movie.  For that reason, Lanovision does not allow users to download movies, only to stream.  The goal of Lanovision is to allow users to share their videos according to Fair Use (although what Fair Use consists of is often not that clear, and might depend on the number of people on the dorm network).

The lack of ability to rewind and fast forward has been a complaint, but Lanovision is still very useful without it.  Most people just watch videos straight through.

MH: Without being too specific, can you tell us the type of content you typically find ready to stream on yale networks? Is it mostly homemade video, or downloaded tv shows/movies, movie previews, or music videos?

PF: On my dorm's network there are some homemade videos, but it is mostly tv shows, movies, and music videos.

MH: Aside from providing a OS X client in the future, what else do you have planned for the future of Lanovision? Would you like to see features moved into applications like iMovie and Adobe's Premiere?

PF: The future depends on how popular Lanovision becomes.  If it starts to really catch, I would love to have it become a platform from which user created video gets distributed and watched.  I could integrate some bittorrent functionality and have algorithms to detect  which videos people like.  By caching videos on the same LAN, Lanovision could help get around some of the bandwidth problems that have prevented streaming video distribution from taking off.  It is likely that long tail effects and user created content are going to revolutionize the video world, just as blogs have revolutionized the written word.  I hope to be right in the middle of it :-)

MH: Thanks Patrick!

by Matt Haughey March 9, 2005 in News

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