DCINFO
Weekly Newsletter |
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May 7, 2007
Volume 17, Issue 8
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P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA Savings
Early-bird pricing for P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA, the premiere DCIA industry conference, ends this Friday May 11th. Click here to sign-up now for P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA and Digital Hollywood Spring, which take place June 11th–14th in Santa Monica, CA, and save $350 over normal registration fees. For special discounts at Doubletree Guest Suites, please contact sari@dcia.info or call 410-643-3585.
Joost Launches Commercially
Peer-to-peer (P2PTV) television service Joost launched commercially this week. Campaigns from 32 companies announced as advertising partners last week will begin to air during May. Existing Joost beta testers now have an unlimited number of invitations to offer friends, family, and colleagues.
"Today marks the beginning of an exciting phase for Joost - we are officially open for business," said David Clark, Executive Vice President of Global Advertising for Joost. "We’re enabling our viewers to share Joost with their friends and family, and we’re working collaboratively with the world’s leading advertisers and agencies to design a new business model for the next generation of television."
Last week, Joost announced that it had signed blue-chip brands including The Coca-Cola Company, HP, Intel, and Nike, as advertising launch partners. Advertisements from all ad launch partners will appear on Joost later this month.
Now, when beta testers visit the "Invite Friends" widget in the "My Joost" area of Joost, they can invite anyone they know to the Joost community. Both new and existing users can download a new version of Joost today.
Founded by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, Joost combines the best of TV and the best of the Internet by offering viewers a unique, TV-like experience enhanced with the choice, control and flexibility of Web 2.0.
Joost is the first online, global P2PTV distribution platform, bringing together advertisers, content owners, and viewers in an interactive, community-driven environment. Joost can be accessed with a broadband Internet connection and offers broadcast-quality content to viewers for free. Joost is based on state-of-the-art, secure, P2P streaming technology.
Joost will have a featured speaker at P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA.
PeerApp Demos P2P Caching & Acceleration
PeerApp, a pioneer in carrier-grade P2P infrastructure solutions for multiple system operators (MSOs) and Internet service providers (ISPs), is demonstrating P2P caching and acceleration capabilities at CableNET Exhibit Booth #221 as part of The Cable Show 2007, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, NV May 7th-9th.
PeerApp is demonstrating both upstream and downstream caching. PeerApp’s UltraBand 1000 and 2000 product capabilities enable broadband service providers to reduce congestion, create smart bandwidth, and improve customer satisfaction.
Subscribers downloading video files using P2P, which can cause congestion on the network, are served transparently from P2P caches residing in MSO networks. This results in bandwidth savings on the transit and internal network links, improves network efficiency, and enhances the subscriber download experience.
Remote Internet users downloading large files via P2P are served from the cache instead of the ISP’s subscriber computers, without impacting or congesting the upstream network segment. This relieves upstream congestion on a cable network’s last mile.
The adoption of P2P for commercial content distribution by CDNs and P2PTV providers like Babelgum, BitTorrent, Joost, and many others, will dramatically impact the ISP networks, and instead of blocking these services, ISPs will be able to employ PeerApp solutions to offer a value added service and monetize the traffic. PeerApp solutions turn the P2P challenge into an opportunity for all broadband service providers.
PeerApp will have a featured speaker at P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 Investments in broadband infrastructure during the 1990s gave Internet users more capacity than they needed.
But advances in rich media content delivery, particularly via peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies, along with the advent of social networks as well as user-generated content (UGC), are now challenging that status quo, and creating new levels of demand.
New investments and continued innovation are both necessary to fulfill the Internet’s expanded potential.
It is especially important that public policy supports these needs.
The term "exaflood," coined by the telecommunications industry’s Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) Council, refers to the torrent of data the Internet will have to handle in the very near future as measured in "exabytes." An exabyte is one thousand pedabytes – or one billion gigabytes of data. Last year, for example, American users created approximately 161 exabytes of digital information.
But by 2010, US Internet users are projected to produce and consume as much as 988 exabytes of data. When that level is achieved, it is very likely that innovative peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, including some of the most promising new P2PTV services now in beta tests and market trials, as well as P2P videogames and even more advanced interactive service offerings, will represent a significant contributing factor; in part because of their expected high popularity, and in part because interactive video is far more bandwidth-intensive than other digital content.
Currently, downloading a single half-hour television show consumes more Internet bandwidth than receiving 200 e-mails a day for a full year, and downloading a single high-definition movie consumes as much bandwidth as 35,000 web-pages.
P2P significantly alleviates the cost and bandwidth burden of less efficient traditional client-server distribution technologies, such as those employed by iTunes and YouTube, and this will greatly help expand the utility of existing Internet capacity.
In addition, advanced distributed computing technologies – which include P2P, peer-assisted, and hybrid P2P content acceleration, caching, compression, streaming, and swarming – will further enhance the productivity of today’s software and available bandwidth. But even with these improvements, projected user demand will pose real challenges.
Consider this: the Library of Congress holds more than 29 million books and magazines, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 57 million manuscripts. It took America two centuries to accumulate that collection. Today, Americans churn out an equivalent amount of digital information every 15 minutes, or about 100 times a day. Just last year, US Internet users created and copied three million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written.
The good news is that with investment, innovation, and supportive public policy, the technology sector, ranging from the large well-established telecommunications industry to our much smaller but steadily-growing distributed computing industry, will be able to upgrade broadband networks and improve the efficiency of content distribution technologies to meet the challenge of the coming "exaflood." This, in turn, will ensure that all users will be able to enjoy the promising new services that the Internet will offer.
Backbone providers are currently investing billions to upgrade the Internet’s infrastructure from OC48 to OC192, and are already planning for OC768, which will provide ever higher capacity levels. Local Internet access providers are also investing tens of billions to upgrade the final link to end-users, enabling upgrades to 100 megabit service – fifty times faster than current broadband – and are even planning for 1 gigabit service in the foreseeable future.
DCIA Member companies, and other participants in the distributed computing industry, are doing their parts as well, with innovative new applications and related technologies that optimize the use of bandwidth, storage, and processing power for the benefit of all users in the series of discrete user-networks, from the smallest LANs to the largest and most popular open protocols, that increasingly make-up the Internet.
We respectfully urge lawmakers and other formulators of public policy to support both the telecommunications and distributed computing industries in these important endeavors. And we encourage our readers to support their elected officials and other governmental authorities along these lines. Share wisely, and take care.
Oversi at CableNET
The Cable Show 2007 attendees will also have the opportunity to learn about OverCache, the P2P and HTTP caching and content delivery solution from Oversi, which is designed to reduce the network load when delivering video content over the Internet.
Oversi will have a featured speaker at P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA.
Verizon Network Investment Rises
Excerpted from Bloomberg News Report by Crayton Harrison
Verizon Communications, the second-largest US phone company, reported an 8.4 percent drop in first-quarter net income after accelerating spending on its $22.9 billion high-speed fiber-optic network. Sales climbed 6.4 percent to $22.6 billion, surpassing analysts’ estimates.
The network, which carries a television service, is part of Verizon’s bid to compete with Comcast and Time Warner Cable, cable-TV companies siphoning off Verizon’s residential phone customers. The business is designed to complement Verizon’s wireless service, which added 1.7 million subscribers in the latest quarter, beating larger rival AT&T.
"Wireless was stronger than we expected," said Jonathan Atkin, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets in San Francisco. "They’ve started the year with a very solid result.’’ He rates the shares "sector perform.’’
Verizon Wireless, the mobile-phone company co-owned by Verizon and Vodafone, now has 60.7 million total customers. The rate at which customers left the company, or "churn’’ rate, fell to 1.1 percent from 1.2 percent a year earlier.
AT&T said last week that it added 1.2 million wireless customers in its latest quarter. The San Antonio-based company reported that total churn was 1.7 percent during that period.
The fiber network won’t subtract as much from second-quarter earnings because its sales increases are starting to keep pace with investment, Toben said.
"For this quarter and next quarter, we’re kind of going as fast as we can,’’ Toben said. While the company wants to expand the network quickly, it must also hire and train employees in many new markets, she said.
Chief Executive Officer Ivan Seidenberg aims to make the network available to 9 million homes this year, a 50 percent increase. Verizon signed 141,000 TV customers on its fiber network in the quarter, increasing its total to 348,000.
"The TV subscriptions were quite robust,’’ said Michael McCormack, an analyst at Bear Stearns in New York. He has an "outperform’’ rating on Verizon shares.
AT&T, the largest US phone company, signed up 10,000 TV customers in the first quarter, when it started a major expansion of its video service.
DCINFO Editor’s Note: AT&T will have a featured speaker at P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA.
M-Bit P2P Network Takes the Lead
Excerpted from Malaysia Star Report by Hari Raj
Each subsequent iteration of the digital revolution sees programmers and developers alike hunting for the Holy Grail of any new hardware or software: the killer application that will make that particular technology irresistible. It’s a validation that usually materializes in widespread acceptance, associated closely with commercial success.
mTouche Technology CEO Eugene Goh thinks that his company might just have found it for the mobile market. Last month, mTouche launched the M-Bit Network, a global P2P search and file super-distribution network.
Elaborating, Goh said it is the first application of its kind in the world because it allows the sharing of content between mobile phones via transmission over wireless mobile networks.
The distinction is important, because until now P2P technology has been limited to sharing content stored in PCs over fixed wire networks. As he points out, the two are entirely different beasts, and the current mobile-based version of the technology has certain limitations.
While data can be stored on both PCs and mobiles, transferring that data throws the differences between the two into stark contrast. For instance, sharing pictures can be a time-consuming process, as anyone who has attempted to send a large number of pictures one at a time via Bluetooth or MMS can attest.
"It’s a lot of work, and people often don’t get around to it because it takes too long or it’s too tiring. And that’s just for pictures – what about videos and such, which are even bigger?" he asked, pointing out that videos captured on newer mobile phones often weigh in above the 20 megabyte mark, too big for many current content sharing applications.
"Although the phone may be equipped to do all these things, you can’t share them with your friends, so that is a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed. With this application, you can basically share any kind of file, from PDF files to text files or MP3s, videos, and pictures," said Goh.
On the issue of speed, an area in which PCs have long held the advantage, Goh said that 4G network speeds allow for data transfers at speeds approaching those found on PCs today – though this is dependent on the network of the respective telco. However, even with a local 3G operator, Goh demonstrated that transferring a picture file takes just a few seconds.
Cisco Addresses P2P in Supervisor Enhancement
Excerpted from Computer Business Review Report by Rik Turner
Cisco Systems has unveiled a product enhancement and a series of architectural templates to enable enterprise networks to address the unique challenges of P2P traffic.
The product side of the announcement involves a deep packet inspection capability, delivered via a hardware upgrade to the Supervisor engine on its flagship 6500 switches, essentially introducing additional Cisco-designed ASICs to handle "DPI at multi-gigabit rates," said Neil Walker, the company’s head of product marketing for core and foundation technologies in Europe.
This is like a point release in the software world, with no change to the backplane speed, but "preparing networks for the slew of P2P content that’s coming on the horizon," he went on.
Where P2P has been synonymous with bandwidth-hungry apps, the situation is changing, as enterprise software vendors such as Microsoft embrace the technology and endorse it for collaboration across different locations and organizations.
There arises a need to be able to differentiate good P2P from bad, which is where the Programmable Intelligent Services Accelerator (PISA) upgrade to Supe32 comes in. "It’s akin to what we’re doing on the carrier side with the P-Cube technology for broadband policy management," said Walker.
"There the carrier can determine who you are, what you’re doing, and the bandwidth you’re consuming to do it. In this case, we’re enabling enterprises to enable wanted P2P and block the unwanted," he went on. "For instance, two employees might be allowed to exchange IM messages, but not if one of them has just accessed some sensitive data on an internal database." PISA is not, however, in any way based on the P-Cube technology, but rather the result of internal development, he went on.
Cisco also unveiled a series of templates for re-architecting corporate networks to address the challenge of P2P technologies.
"The 6500 can sit in a corporate data center, of course, but some large enterprises also put it in the wiring closet and run all their LAN traffic over the platform. In addition, there are corporate customers who put the 6500 out in branches with WAN modules instead of running routers, while still others use them as an Ethernet demarcation point on a managed service, connecting over their Ethernet port to a carrier router."
"This is an enhancement to your existing LAN card and so has the scalability that a bump-in-the-wire appliance can’t offer," concluded Walker.
File Swapping Veers into the Fast Lane
Excerpted from Scientific American Report by John Borland
A new file-swapping method could speed up downloads to rates as much as three times faster than the popular service BitTorrent. The approach, outlined and demonstrated last month by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, and Intel Research, would let file-swappers seeking a specific title download bits of it from similar, but not necessarily identical files.
The idea is already drawing interest from commercial content distribution companies, along with discussion in P2P communities online.
"It makes an awful lot of sense," said Andrew Parker, CTO of CacheLogic, which distributes movie and game files online. The company has been independently researching a "very similar" concept, he added.
With high-definition online video just around the corner, proposals for speeding downloads and easing network traffic are increasingly welcome. File-swapping networks, rife with video, games, and music, can provide a real-world laboratory with lessons for the broader Net.
In their quest for speed, most modern P2P applications break files into thousands of chunks and allow these individual components to be swapped separately. This allows someone with only half a movie downloaded to serve as a secondary source for that part of the content.
Many files can still take days to download, however, as original sources go offline, or as a source’s upstream bandwidth clogs.
Aiming to fix this problem, Carnegie Mellon’s David Andersen and his colleagues reasoned that many files online today are, in fact, near-duplicates with minor differences – identical songs labeled differently, movies in different languages or different versions of the same software program.
To make this shared content accessible, the team created a "hand-printing" system, a unique digital identifier based on the exact contents of the file. Unlike more traditional digital "fingerprinting," commonly used to identify or authenticate documents, this system also allows fast comparison of a limited number of individual chunks, which can then be swapped if found to be identical.
Tests of the team’s prototype, dubbed Similarity-Enhanced Transfer (SET), found it to be as much as three times faster than BitTorrent for songs and about 30 percent faster for movie files when drawing content from similar as well as identical files over DSL-speed connections.
Parker said SET or something like it is "certain" to end up in CacheLogic’s toolbox before long.
DCINFO Editor’s Note: CacheLogic will have a featured speaker at P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA.
Swapper for Faster File Transfers via Caching
Excerpted from GigaOM Report
Personal P2P and personal file-sharing services are dime a dozen. Not a day passes when some new start-up shows up with a new offering, with a slightly different twist.
Wambo, previously known as Perenety, is throwing its hat in the ring, with Swapper, a new software-service that promises to address the biggest pain of file transfers: upload speeds.
Wambo was started by co-founders Arnaud Tellier (CTO), Guillaume Thonier (Chief Architect), and Xavier Casanova (CEO). The company’s first product, Shooter, launched almost a year ago in beta. It tried to do too much, and had a difficult interface.
The trio and their distributed work force (India, Estonia and California) went back to the drawing board and came up with a simpler and easier to use application called Swapper. For now it is a Windows-only application.
"Shooter was the early prototype and we used it to get users and build a small P2P network of a few hundred nodes, for development and testing," said Casanova.
While the application’s key features - swapping music, photos, and videos with trusted friends - are on tap from any of the dozens of start-ups, what is different about Swapper is that it combines a P2P distributed file system with upload caching, which gives the application speed some oomph.
Classic caching (reverse proxies, CDNs) saves bandwidth only where downloads of popular content are concerned. This helps boost the download speeds. Swapper is the exact opposite - aka upload caching. Given that most broadband connections are asymmetrical (at least in the US), the upload speeds are the biggest issue with P2P apps.
Here’s how it works: when you are sending a friend a song, Swapper checks with its servers to see if that file has already been uploaded by you or someone else. This check is anonymous and fast.
"The entire process is anonymous and doesn’t ever expose any of your content," says Casanova. "Most MP3s, personal photos, and mini-videos are less than 20-25MB. We compress, cache, and pre-fetch to make these fly. That’s our market. Not the large gigabyte sized files."
Wambo hopes to make money two ways: by delivering promotional content delivered in Swapper similar to e-mail newsletters for a fee and offering a pro-version of the service for small and medium sized businesses.
DCINFO Editor’s Note: Wambo will have a featured speaker at P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA.
Internet Technology Report
2007 Technology - Internet - Infrastructure, a new market research report, is now available from Reportlinker.com.
This biennial report covers TCP, UDP, SCTP, IP addresses, routing, multi-homing, route aggregation, provider-independent IP addresses, IPv6, dual-stack IPv4/IPv6, IPv6 mobility, NAT, QoS, MPLS, IPv4 address exhaustion, HTTP, name-based virtual hosting, trace-route, ping, the domain name system, name-server management, reverse address translation, IDNA - non-Latin characters in domain names, e-mail servers, web-based e-mail systems, SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, virus and spam filtering, e-mail encryption, HTML e-mail, "format=flowed" e-mail format, discussion lists, Telnet, FTP, SSH (Secure Shell), SSH tunneling, SCP (Secure Copy), SFTP (Secure FTP), Usenet, IRC, network file system (NFS), Samba, virtual private networks (VPNs), peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks and the burden of their traffic, Gnutella and swarming, BitTorrent, anonymity networks, TOR, and commercial anonymity services.
The report is a technical introduction, for people without an engineering background, to the Internet’s infrastructure and to its major protocols and applications. It begins with an overview of the Internet’s future, including two challenges to its continuing stability – the crisis in routing and addressing and the proliferation of botnets.
The report discusses P2P file-sharing networks, which now comprise a major portion of Internet traffic. BitTorrent and other P2P systems send continual, scattered patterns of packets with high upstream volumes from home and office computers, placing strain on DSL and particularly HFC cable modem access networks.
The report also reviews anonymity networks, including The Onion Router (TOR). These provide potentially crucial communications for people in oppressive countries, but are also a haven for hackers. While most of the material is introductory and of a tutorial nature, critical viewpoints of particular technologies are also included.
P2P Start-Up Snags Every Film in Hollywood
Excerpted from The Register Report
Every news source that covers digital media this week is heaping praise on start-up Vudu, which has managed to get most of Hollywood, not counting Sony, to give it access to major motion pictures for downloading over the web, using a P2P architecture.
But apart from the non-technical press release, there is no data on just how this system works, and it seems to have an inherent contradiction in that it doesn’t require a PC - you can just link the set-top directly to a broadband line, for the princely sum of $300.
Well, at least that might be a contradiction. The set-top, in order to be a P2P client, is almost certainly a stripped down PC of sorts, and it must use some operating software, and it must need considerable storage - not only so customers can store their movies DVR-like, but so that collectively all of the devices out there can store the entire 5,000 film video library multiple times over, hopefully encrypted, scattered among the various client devices so there are some benefits from using P2P.
It isn’t essential that a P2P architecture sits on a PC, but that’s what most of them are written for, and we suspect that at $300 this device is, conceptually at least, rather PC-like.
Vudu said it has closed deals with seven major motion picture studios: Disney, Lionsgate, New Line, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios, and Warner Brothers, plus 15 independents.
"We’ve created the product everyone wants, the product many have tried to build, and, until now, the product no one has succeeded in delivering," said Tony Miranz, founder of Vudu. "We’ve brought together the best team in Silicon Valley to give movie lovers the ability to watch thousands of movies instantly, without leaving their homes."
Miranz and Chairman Alain Rossmann said the team is made up of technology veterans from TiVo, WebTV, Openwave, 2Wire, Slim Devices, OpenTV, and Danger, and that the company has funding from Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital.
In the same week, a UK launch is right on the money in the form of RawFlow, a P2P PC client that has a track record, offers streaming, and can do it in the ever-so-popular Flash Video format.
We have been waiting for this to come along. Flash video powers systems like Brightcove and much of the YouTube video, simply because it is so easy to load onto a website compared to other video formats and it comes with its own On2 Technologies codec. There is starting to be a substantial tools market with offerings from both Adobe, which owns Macromedia Flash, and from On2.
But what was missing from the equation was a P2P system that can reduce or eliminate the content delivery costs of bandwidth, which in most systems takes up about 30 per cent of the total system costs.
RawFlow is the first to offer streaming Flash in its Intelligent Content Distribution (ICD) latest version, but our guess is that it won’t be the last.
RawFlow isn’t a service like Vudu: it’s an enabling technology, but we are happy to bet that if it can work out how to drop this into P2P, then so can a number of other P2P systems out there, and this is the start of a flood of applications that will allow this. And one or more of these will open up the capability of set-tops that house the P2P client and cost a lot less than $300, taking the signal direct to the TV.
In the meantime this week, Joost, which perhaps has the lead mindshare in P2P video distribution, took several steps closer to its own vision of bringing P2PTV to every PC on the planet, when it announced the companies that have pledged advertising support for its service.
In all it says it has 32 blue-chip advertisers on board and reveals that there are 150,000 beta users and 500,000 individuals registered and waiting for the service. Various sources suggest that the initial three month ad campaigns will cost between $50,000 and $100,000 and bring in well over $3 million globally during ramp up, that will quickly rise to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Joost also added content deals this week with Adult Swim, CNN, Hasbro, the National Hockey League, Sports Illustrated, and Sony Pictures Television, for comedy, cartoons, animation, film, news, documentaries, lifestyle, and, of course, sports.
DCINFO Editor’s Note: RawFlow will have a featured speaker at P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA.
PlayStation May Offer P2P Movie Sharing
Excerpted from Games Digest Report
An interesting, but as yet unconfirmed, rumor is doing the rounds suggesting that Sony might be offering P2P file sharing to deliver movies to PS3 users. It is believed that this is being done with the full support of the Hollywood studios. What makes this more plausible i
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