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The EU-funded P2P-Next project is built on BitTorrent, in a bid to bring peer-to-peer technology to live broadcasts as well as downloaded video.

The researchers are aiming to help broadcasters overcome the traditional server model, where companies such as YouTube and the BBC are forced to maintain huge server facilities to serve tens of thousands of simultaneous streams.

BT-owned ISP PlusNet released figures earlier today, claiming that video streaming had increased by 170% in the UK over the past year since the launch of the BBC's iPlayer service, highlighting the problem for

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boadcasters and ISPs alike.

P2P-Next's SwarmPlayer supports three streaming modes: download and watch afterwards, watch while downloading and live streaming.

The researchers have launched a beta version of the software in the hope that mass uptake will help test whether the system can cope with live streaming, although the team admits it's not entirely confident.

"Because of the experimental nature of this setup, we cannot actually guarantee that you'll see the video at the highest quality," the P2P Next website claims.

"In the worst case, you may not see anything at all. For example, other users may not have enough bandwidth available to serve you with the video stream at full speed, or other users may be unreachable because they are firewalled. In fact, one of the goals of this experiment is to measure the impact of those factors on the performance."

Indeed, in our brief tests we were unable to make the video stream at all, with no available peers to stream from.

The project has benefited from 14 million Euros worth of funding from the EU and other partners, and is using test footage from the BBC in its trials.

The SwarmPlayer software currently works on Windows and Linux, with a Mac version due to be released shortly.