Do P2P Networks Really Support Streaming?

Dan Rayburn | Thursday April 26, 2007 | 12:05 AM | Comments (7)

I know it may seem strange to ask that question, but part of the problem with P2P technology is that most content owners don’t know what P2P does and does not support. I’m with them. Even I don’t know what P2P distribution can and can’t do. For instance, many P2P providers call their service "P2P streaming" but is it really streaming? If you are not using a Flash Media Server for example, then how are the P2P networks delivering "streaming" Flash video?

There seems to be no standard amongst the P2P providers as to what they all provide, the range of services vary greatly and many speak to P2P as being a live solution, others say only on-demand. Yet what is interesting to note about nearly all of the P2P delivery providers websites is that they all have the exact same sales propositions. All of the sites talk to the same value proposition being
quality, cost and security.

And none of them that I can find talk to reporting, which seems odd. How are the P2P delivery networks going to distinguish themselves from one another? They have to do something, because as of right now, visiting each of their sites, they all sound and look exactly the same.

Filed in Content Delivery | Permalink | Comments (7)

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  • http://profile.typekey.com/m_eiman/ m_eiman

    While I can’t speak for anyone else, the impression that I’ve gotten while looking at our competition is that you need to separate “P2P” into “P2P Broadcast” and “P2P On-demand”. The techniques used in each case are quite different on the technical level, although they are all P2P. In the broadcast category there are a bunch of solutions that are more or less Peercasting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peercasting ) with a different name, and in the on-demand case most are more or less similar to BitTorrent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bittorrent ).
    The problem with selling P2P is that since you don’t own the network you cannot guarantee anything more than “it usually works well”. This is of course something customers don’t really like to hear, so to calm them down you continue with “but it’s a lot cheaper when it works!”. And for the end user, there’s no inherent benefit to using a P2P solution, and it’s also essentially invisible to them. To convince the end user that they really want to install it you have to present them with some form of carrot (cheaper! better quality!), and it’s basically up to the P2P company to come up with and present these carrots to their customers if they’re to be their customers at all.
    There are of course differences between the different P2P solutions, ours for example uses existing server infrastructure so that our customers don’t have to make big changes to how they operate, but we all share the same basic problem of convincing the end user that bandwidth in exchange for better quality or lower price is a good trade. Which it is!
    - Mikael Eiman, CTO at http://contribio.com

  • http://www.WellcomeMat.com Christian Sterner

    I find that the typical end user doesn’t know the difference between streaming & progressive download to begin with. So, it is almost inherent that these two content distribution types are confused in discussions. The thing with progressive downloads is that they can be looked at as both more economical, and a better user experience. I honestly can only think of one reason why I would ever consider streaming: if copyrights were paramount.
    The P2P value proposition seems most applicable for CDN companies, whom can control/optimize the network for its use. Outside of CDN(s) offering P2P services, could it be safe to say that we are strictly selling based on price advantages? Widely used, we’d be talking about a lot of factors that could potentially make a video experience good or bad. If I am rocking a dual zion processor, with 4 gigs of ram, and I have a solid connection speed, the experience lends itself in the direction of great. Take the machine/network down a couple notches and we are talking a different game.
    Thanks for this post, and the first comment Mikael! You guys have changed my thinking a bit on this subject.

  • http://profile.typekey.com/m_eiman/ m_eiman

    Even streaming content is fairly easy to capture if it isn’t encrypted, although copying downloaded file is easier.
    One benefit of a P2P system is that the bandwidth for content you buy on the server side covers the guarateed -minimum- number of users, not the -maximum- number of users as with a centralized system. Assuming that not all users are behind tight firewalls, you’ll be able to serve more users without upgrading your server’s Internet connection. And this effect just gets bigger the more users there are, which means you’ll have to spend less money on fixed costs like servers, net connection, support for servers, etc.
    Even a small company can expect to be able to serve a substantial number of users without having to make big investments in infrastructure, which could decrease the advantages big companies with big budgets have over smaller ones. This could erode the power of the biggest media giants, so I’m guessing that while they see P2P as a way of saving money, they also see it as a threat in the long run.

  • http://www.musmo.com KwangErn Liew

    I have yet to see TRUE P2P streaming.
    P2P technology can be best described as what Bittorrent is. That is, data automatically being transfers not from one peer (point or site), but rather from many peers. Similar to multiple segments in a download, for those familiar with download managers.
    But to have it for streaming, it would require sequential data transfers from peers, rather than random as what it is for P2P technology these days.
    Friend showed me P2P streaming the other day, and it’s nothing more than BitTorrent technology backend, coupled with a front-end magic that let’s end user play the downloaded content.
    Just another marketing smartness :)

  • http://profile.typekey.com/m_eiman/ m_eiman

    Well, naturally a user receiving for example a video stream will have to receive it more or less from start to finish, but that doesn’t mean that the data cannot come from a lot of different sources.
    As soon as the user has gotten some data, others will download parts of data in a more or less random fashion since they’ll all be at different locations in the file (assuming we’re talking about on-demand streaming and not live streaming).
    With live streaming it just takes a little bit of artificial latency to be able to do pretty much the same thing. If the users view the stream one minute later than “real time” it will give the P2P system time to distribute the data. If you want to be able to prevent ‘bad data’ injection attacks in a setting like this you’ll probbably need to do some form of private/public key signing on the data parts so that the recipients can verify that they’re from the real source..
    But I guess that depending on your requirements it might not qualify as ‘live’ streaming any more.. But it can be done! :)
    Our system only does on-demand streaming, but most of the video people want to view is pre-recorded anyway. I’d say it’s mostly sports that need live streaming?

  • tv_addict

    Zattoo (zattoo.com) streams live, real TV, with under 5-second latency from the actual broadcast signal, and even faster channel changes:
    http://www.redferret.net/?p=8713
    So true P2P streaming is definitely possible…

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