A suggestion on the fututre of Shoutcast

[atsakir]

First of all let me say that although I have a CS degree and I'm currently finishing an MSc in Computer games, I am no network or streaming technology buff and I am not at all sure about the feasibility of what I' m about to suggest.

Having said that here are my thoughts:
The main problem of broadcasters is lack of bandwidth. For those who want to transmit on a non-commercial basis, the cost of keeping up a high-bandwidth connection escalates, especially if they transmit good streams. My prime example for that is the somafm.com station. Although the Shoutcast technology allows relaying of streams, finding people who can and want to act as rebroadcasters is hard. Thinking on this I came up with the following idea.

Why not use the principles behind peer to peer file sharing for audio streams (and maybe in the future video too)? If a stream can be split up in substreams then the server from which the stream originates can relay the stream in substreams to a number of lower-bandwidth peers which in turn relay to others and so on. The client application connects to a number of peers from which receives the substreams which then reassembles in a single sream.
In the meantime depending on the outgoing bandwidth available, each client becomes also a retransmitter of part of the original stream, kind of like the way the Gnutella network is structured when a search is initiated.
This way the bandwidth load can be balanced and it will become cheaper and easier for more people to transmit.

I don't know if all this makes sense to you but I would really like to see an Open Streaming network out there where peer to peer technology is used to actually SHARE music without necessarily 'keeping' it...

I don't know about you but if I had an ADSL with 128k upstream I know that I wouldn't be able to transmit and maintain a decent stream of my own, but what if I could use some of that bandwidth to relay a part of my favorite station's stream to someone else at the same time as listening?

Well, I haven't really started looking into technical details but this is the general idea.

What do you think?