By Nate Anderson
July 18, 2008 - 06:00AM CT

Dutch academic Dr. Johan Pouwelse knows BitTorrent well, having spent a year of his life examining its inner workings. Now, as part of the EU-funded P2P-Next team, Pouwelse and his researchers have been entrusted with €19 million, and what the EU wants in return is nothing less than a "4th-generation" peer-to-peer system that will one day be tasked with replacing over-the-air television broadcasts.

P2P-Next is the largest publicly-funded team in the world working on such technology (though plenty of researchers at Microsoft, IBM, and countless tiny startups are also racing to deliver a better P2P experience), and today the team launched a trial program designed to test its progress to date. What sets the project apart from the traditional BitTorrent architecture is its focus not on downloadable video, but on live streaming.

Current BitTorrent implementations, focused as they are on offering easy access to downloadable content, aren't well suited to delivering live streaming TV across the Internet, but Pouwelse is convinced that this is the future. There's "no doubt that TV will come through the Internet in a few years," he told Ars earlier this week. Obviously, deployment of such a system depends on consumer electronics firms and broadcasters, but Pouwelse's job is to make sure that the technology is ready when they are.

Currently, streaming solutions like YouTube and Hulu are generally based on a server model; this doesn't scale well without inflicting massive bandwidth costs on the broadcaster. Downloadable video, already being experimented with by the BBC and NBC, can use P2P for distribution, but is only suited to after-the-fact viewing.