Solutions

Commercial P2P content delivery

Digital Content Distribution Market Trends

Internet Video is the next big trend in media; when it finally takes off it will shake the TV and Movie industry to its core, disrupting long-established business models with significant new threats and opportunities.

Internet Video (or Broadband Video – BBV) must not be confused with IPTV. IPTV uses IP as its transport mechanism to deliver Video across private networks that are managed to ensure Quality of Service and therefore a guaranteed user experience. Internet Video is the best-effort delivery of digital content through or over the open, unmanaged Internet; real-time and pre-recorded video packets compete with all the other IP packets across the Internet (full of data from emails or websites etc) on an equal basis.

Internet Video is nothing new, but until now its potential has been greatly limited by a lack of bandwidth to the consumer home, and more importantly, a lack of premium quality video content. Over the past 18 months both of these parameters have started to change. The availability of hit series like 'Lost' and 'Desperate Housewives' from Disney-ABC and similar events worldwide represents the willingness of major content owners to experiment with direct-to-home Web distribution models. For some content owners, it is a case of meeting a proven consumer demand for recorded content that is made available almost instantly to the PC as well as video and mobile players. For other content owners, Internet Video aggregation services (like iTunes or Google Video or AOL's new Video portal) is a way to remind the major Pay Video operators that they do not have a monopoly on content distribution. This can only be good for the content provider business when negotiating their future deals.

The Internet is becoming the point of content origination, but Internet Video is expanding its reach to the point where the term can define Video on multiple devices that originated from an Internet service. While a segment of Internet Video providers are employing traditional CDNs to distribute content, they are realizing that it is neither scalable nor cost effective and as a consequence, are contemplating joining those that have adopted P2P technology for content distribution. It seems inevitable that P2P will soon emerge as the technology of choice for a cost effective and scalable distribution over the Internet.

Consumer product vendors are already employing P2P clients on set-top-boxes that connect to the Internet directly, on wireless routers and network-attached storage devices, thereby reducing or eliminating completely the need for an always on PC. Unexpected alliances are already emerging. Bittorrent, whose powerful peer-to-peer software application threatened to 'Napsterise' Video, has convinced major content owners of its value and has already launched the service. AOL Video employs P2P technology to delivery high quality Video to its audience.

Internet Video is exercising the minds of all platform operators. It is also creating fear. Internet-based content aggregators who potentially compete with Pay Video operators for VOD have been referred to as 'over-the-top' providers, since they deliver their services over somebody else's network. How should a telco or cable operator react to such a service when their ultra-fast broadband last mile - built at great cost - is used to deliver competitive services over which they have no control over, or from which they achieve no financial benefit?

PeerApp solution

It is impossible to curb the enthusiasm of the multitude of the Internet Video service providers beginning to use commercial peer-to-peer platforms to serve content to the consumers. ISPs should accept Internet Video as inevitable and seek revenue shares in return for integrating big-brand service providers into their user interfaces. Or they can “combat” it by providing their own Internet Video services that have an edge over the competition. PeerApp solutions are geared to empower the ISPs with technology to allow them to either compete with the 'over-the-top' providers or cooperate with the new Video aggregator.

All of the P2P based Video service providers face the following challenges and ISPs can offer a remedy to these problems and charge them for the value add or offer a competing service that has much higher quality. By partnering with ISPs this new breed of Video service provider will be able to deliver a better experience and accelerate the consumer adoption of their services. PeerApp’s solutions will bring the reliability and predictability of today’s CDNs to P2P while still retaining the economic and scalability features of P2P.

P2P Challenges	Addressed By PeerApp
Requires incentives for cooperation
Hard to ensure end 2 end full connectivity
Lack of locality in creases delays
A symmetric links slow the downloads
Variable bandwidth, peers come and go
NAT Traversal