I think Microsoft’s television strategy is pretty clear: throw as many ideas and products out there as you can and see what sticks. With MSN TV, Mediaroom, Windows Media Centre, and a number of other products, you’d think Microsoft would be content to improve what they already have. But no, today they announced LiveStation, a P2P live television broadcasting application built using Silverlight.

The project is a joint venture between Microsoft Research and UK-based Skinkers. Don Dodge has more on the technology behind LiveStation:

LiveStation is built on two research technologies, Pastry and SplitStream, from Microsoft’s Cambridge Research Lab. Pastry is a type of P2P system called a ‘distributed hash table,’ which makes it easier for computers to find and store information, and to organize themselves for collaborative tasks. Splitstream is an application built on top of Pastry which allows real-time streams such as live video to be robustly distributed peer-to-peer.

TechCrunch wrote about LiveStation today too:

And while it is certainly an excellent demonstration of the flexibility of Silverlight, its not even close to being productized and launched. For now, consider it little more than a pretty video.

True enough. You can watch that video here. LiveStation is currently in closed beta. I entered my email at the beta site, so hopefully I’ll get an invite soon.

For more on this story, check out TechMeme.

UPDATE: Long Zheng makes the very good point that
LiveStation isn’t really a Microsoft product.