The Open Media Network (OMN) was a

P2PTV P2PTV refers to peer-to-peer (P2P) software applications designed to redistribute video streams in real time on a P2P network; the distributed video streams are typically TV channels from all over the world but may also come from other sources. T ...

service and application which provided distribution of educational and public service programs. The network was founded in 2005 by

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was on ...

pioneers Mike Homer and

Marc Andreessen Marc Lowell Andreessen ( ; born July 9, 1971) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon ...

.John Borland (April 25, 2005
Netscape pioneers launch free content network
''CNET.com'' After operating for an extended beta period, development ended with the serious illness and subsequent death in 2009 of founder Homer. The OMN network operated as a large, centrally controlled grid network for the distribution of free radio and TV content over P2P, described as "part TiVo, part BitTorrent file swapping". The Open Media Network client application was available for Apple

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

(but not Intel based Macs as of October 2007) and Microsoft Windows (XP and 2000, but not Vista as of October 2007). The OMN infrastructure was powered by Kontiki grid network technology, a commercial alternative to BitTorrent. The U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of ed ...

) launched a "download to own" initiative with OMN and

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

which allowed viewers to purchase episodes of popular PBS programs via the Internet for viewing anytime, anywhere. The fees for downloading videos ranged from about $2 to about $8 (U.S.). Video files were made available in whatever format the producer chose, including

WMV Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is a ...

and Google's GVI format.Dennis Haarsager (2006-07-27
OMN vs Google Video comparison
''Technology 360'' blog.

References

{{reflist File sharing networks BitTorrent clients

See also

References