I think it would be really cool to have some type of audience participation built into a system like this. One of the parts that I hate most about watching the news is that I know I'm watching a singular viewpoint, and that nobody else has a chance to provide commentary on the topic at hand. Considering how much BitTorrent stressed that they wanted to provide a independent coverage, I think that some type of viewer input would be fantastic. It would help take watching the news into the interactive age.

Every example of a call in style audience interaction I've seen winds up being dominated by 'pranks' or off topic ramblings.

I'm not sure what their (BitTorrent TM) business plan is. First of all you have the problem of the name. The BitTorrent name is tainted with illegal sharing activities, and has been so for the past decade. Then there's the problem of monetizing something like this where you have other platforms like YouTube that work quite well for streaming live video, and they're pretty much free.

Also, can't download neither BitTorrent Live and News, and there's no source code. How do these people make money and/or stay relevant?

I'm not claiming p2p live video streaming is an easy task, and in fact, it seems to be an impossible task at this point, otherwise we'd see open source projects that make p2p video streaming work, and we don't.

It seems to be more of a bandwidth problem, rather than a software/algorithm problem: if the video isn't extremely relevant (lots of peers sharing it) and/or the source peer doesn't have lots of bandwidth, then this will simply not work.

"Our main source of revenue is off the toolbars we push out, which isn't a great source of monetization, but it's something. You can do the math on how many installs we have and what the monetization of toolbars is, and subtract out the costs of having 50 employees, and you'll get a reasonable ballpark of how profitable we are, although the short answer is very. Even lousy monetization works well when you have more users than Twitter." - Bram Cohen

[0] - https://www.quora.com/How-profitable-is-BitTorrent-Inc

WebTorrent seems pretty usable, or would be for something like news with a few seed bots for news streams.

Not sure about tfa/source though, can't read the article at the moment (at work).

Might be interesting if they actually open-sourced the underlying Bittorrent Live protocol, which they have explicitly stated they won't do Because Piracy.

Surprised that they choose apple as the first ecosystem to launch in.

Al Jazeera America wasn't bad, and probably more even handed than most US news sources... in-line with BBC America imho.

That said, most people prefer their news source biased to their own political leanings.

What was wrong with Al Jazerra America?