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The European Union is spending 14m Euros to create a standard way to send TV via the Internet. Partners including the BBC and the European Broadcasting Union are also contributing a total of £3.7m. The four-year project ‘P2P Next’ aims to create a peer-t0-peer system that can pipe programmes to set-top boxes and home TV sets, based on the BitTorrent technology which many of us already use to share movies and music. So the system will have no central host handing out the content, but all the machines downloading a show will make parts of it available to all the others that want it – distributing the load across the network.

Jari Ahola from the VTT technical research centre in Finland said that the incentive of the broadcasters is to take their distribution mechanism beyond terrestrial, satellite and cable, and they can use the Internet as a distribution platform for very low cost. Once complete the system will be able to handle stored content for download and stream content from live football matches or concerts.

The first stages of the project are due to be complete this August, and by July 2009 a more complete test version should be released that can pipe programmes to set-top boxes so people can watch on their TV rather than their PC.