Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?

Sat Jan 6 21:44:20 UTC 2007

On 6-jan-2007, at 15:07, Colm MacCarthaigh wrote:

>> Is it a peer to peer type of system where it redistributes a portion
>> of the stream as you are viewing it to other users?

> Yes, though not neccessarily as you are viewing it. A proportion of  
> what
> you have viewed previously is cached and can be made available to  
> other
> peers.

This is a really weird service. It sends out semi-live streams (as  
opposed to downloads) but it can be cached and made available later,  
it's also peer-to-peer but needs a massive network or at least  
massive amounts of peering.

With Bittorrent, it's typical for people to download faster than they  
upload, and then continue to upload for some time after they've  
finished downloading. This works very well as long as not everyone  
starts downloading at the same time. However, for something with time  
constraints this doesn't work so well. Either you're limited by the  
maximum up speed, which generally isn't enough to support decent  
video, or the peer-to-peer aspect can only take care of part of the  
required total upload capacity so there must be additional servers to  
take care of the rest.

I'm guessing the latter is the case here, and this new service works  
much the same way as Skype in the sense that it will plunder people's  
upload capacity for the benefit of the people running the network,  
rather than being a real peer-to-peer service.

ISPs should of course welcome this, because when people start craving  
their daily 2 GB fix you got them exactly where you want them,  
especially in markets with little or no broadband competition. 