Every year, Prix Europa invites the finest European television, radio and Internet productions, as well as their makers and managers to Berlin for a week of festival and competition. To mark the opening of the festival, Radiomultikulti from Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) transmitted an opening concert on Saturday 14 October at 8pm from the broadcasting house in Berlin, which was made available in 5.1 surround sound via satellite and via the Internet with a live streaming P2P 'broadcast'.

Saturday night's P2P broadcast was a 'first' for the EBU, Eurovision, RBB, and Prix Europa - testing what may be the technology of the future of radio delivery. The experiment was the world's first attempt to integrate HE AAC encoding software in real-time with P2P distribution using Octoshape technology.

The sound quality of AAC at 160kbit/s was outstanding for the whole duration of the event (one hour), despite the fact that the AAC software was only a beta version. David Wood, EBU Technical Department commented on what he heard: "We were really impressed by the quality of the 5.1 multichannel audio. Coming from a laptop or PC you had the real quality of listening that only surround sound can bring. Because of the skill of the 5.1 producer at RBB and the audio coding technology, the sound quality we heard was as clean as for those in the concert hall itself".

While the opening ceremony was taking place live in Berlin with a concert by Gaiteros de Lisboa, 
back at EBU headquarters some streaming enthusiasts were listening to the P2P concert via laptop 
and keeping a close eye on the experiment. 

This successful experiment illustrated how the Internet can be used to provide an excellent quality of multichannel audio live streaming, while reaching a large number of people worldwide in a cost efficient manner and goes to show that P2P will significantly impact both radio and television broadcasting.

Click here for a diagram of the P2P experiment.

Warm thanks to all of those who made the experiment a success. 

/nc