April 16, 2007
Volume 17, Issue 5
Akamai Goes P2P
Excerpted from Forbes Report by Andy Greenberg
Akamai Technologies has created an $8 billion company moving big chunks of data quickly and expensively. But it’s still been threatened by peer-to-peer (P2P) competitors who move tiny bits of data quickly and cheaply. Now, to compete with its file-sharing foes, the company is itself buying into the P2P business.
On Thursday, the bandwidth behemoth purchased P2P service Red Swoosh, a small P2P software company, for about $15 million in stock.
By adding Red Swoosh’s technology to its data-moving arsenal, Akamai gains the ability to rapidly transfer files by piecing together bits of data distributed on clients’ computers around the world, rather than merely shortcutting the files in one piece between Akamai’s enormous servers.
Purchasing Red Swoosh also silences critics who saw P2P clients as a growing competitor to the company’s market dominance.
"This is very much a technology acquisition," said Akamai spokesman Jeff Young. "But we’re also gaining some very skilled software developers, whom we will be integrating into our Bay Area engineering team."
Just how Akamai will integrate P2P file transferring with its core business remains a mystery. But it may model its use of the technology on industry leading VeriSign, which switches between traditional content delivery and cheaper P2P methods, depending on how much a customer is willing to spend.
That ability cost VeriSign $62 million, which it spent on the P2P management company Kontiki in 2001. Given Akamai’s $428 million in revenue last year, $15 million is a small price for Akamai to shore up its position as the dominant deliverer of the Internet’s ever-expanding files.
PeerApp Awarded Key P2P Patent
PeerApp, a pioneer in carrier-grade P2P infrastructure solutions for Internet service providers (ISPs) has been awarded a key patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for technology that enables P2P content distribution and acceleration. The issued US Patent No. 7,203,741 is for a "method and system for accelerating receipt of data in a client-to-client network."
The invention outlines an advanced P2P acceleration solution that allows ISPs to manage and monetize P2P traffic.
"This is a ground-breaking patent for P2P caching and content delivery and it emphasizes the position of PeerApp as a pioneering provider of P2P infrastructure solutions and leader in its market segment," said Robert Mayer, PeerApp CEO.
As part of the patent approval process, PeerApp successfully demonstrated the complexity of P2P caching. P2P caching involves handling millions of download/streaming sessions and terabytes of storage as well as unique aspects of open P2P networks such as maintaining transparency and DMCA Section 512b Compliance.
Many ISPs around the world have deployed PeerApp’s UltraBand and have realized immediate benefits of this unique technology in the form of lower Internet transit bandwidth costs, greater network efficiency, improved subscriber experience, and strengthening of their brand name.
"Our P2P content delivery technology is a critical enabler of high-quality user experience for downloading and streaming. With the growing adoption of P2P technology for video delivery by major movie studios and content owners, our solutions can be deployed by ISPs to offer P2P CDN services with the reliability of traditional CDNs and the economics of P2P. We have turned the P2P challenge into an opportunity for ISPs," added Alan Arolovitch, PeerApp CTO.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 We hope to see you at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention (NAB2007) in Las Vegas, NV this week.
The DCIA is very proud to co-sponsor the Interactive Television Alliance (ITA) Content Incubator (C360), which will feature the participation of DCIA Members Javien Digital Payment Solutions, Oversi, and RawFlow.
We are also co-sponsoring the ITA press breakfast with The Hollywood Reporter and the ITA luncheon roundtable session, both of which are scheduled for Tuesday and will include DCIA Member speakers. Please call 410-476-7965 for more information about attending these events.
Other participating DCIA exhibitors and attendees of note at NAB2007 will include Abacast (C554), Azureus, INTENT MediaWorks, Octoshape (C3147), and VeriSign (C2546).
"NAB2007 provides a very exciting opportunity for us to discuss the quality and efficiency of our technology and how it can save broadcasters bandwidth and ultimately money," said Mike King CEO of Abacast. "Our technology ranges anywhere from live radio streaming to P2PTV."
On Monday at NAB, Abacast and WhiteBlox will announce a partnership whereby video content can be delivered efficiently and effectively through the WhiteBlox Internet television solutions suite using the Abacast hybrid P2PTV streaming technology. WhiteBlox is exhibiting in Booth C1059 at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Central Hall Two, just east of Abacast in Booth C554.
"Abacast is proud to be a part of this event, as it points to the heart of Abacast’s mission of bringing new technology to broadcast entertainment and communication. Abacast aids broadcasters in using new technology to create profitable business models online. Abacast’s ability to reach a large audience with a high quality stream at a very low cost is the key."
Abacast offers an Ad Injection Solution that helps broadcasters easily webcast alternative content in place of terrestrial content. The solution allows the broadcaster freedom from time restraints, intelligent ad scheduling, and detailed statistics of the injected content all while maintaining the integrity of the connection. For more information about Abacast’s NAB broadcast and a link to the stream, please click here.
Javien delivers total commerce technology to content providers for online and mobile sales of digital content and physical goods. The most flexible, comprehensive solution available, the platform powers sales for leading companies in entertainment, media, and publishing including MTV Networks, Trans World Entertainment, and Forbes.com.
The strength of this ASP-hosted technology rests clearly in its flexibility, depth of features and low total cost of ownership. The core, transactional engine drives the platform while its add-on components (micro-payment aggregation, alternative payments, and expandable digital/physical merchandising tools) empower customers to adapt the technology without sacrificing critical business rules.
Javien’s platform integrates with the payment gateways, processors, and a variety of third-party providers. Digital storefronts, websites, or media players integrate with Javien technology using API or HTML methods making technical integration easy and seamless.
Oversi offers innovative solutions for P2P networks in today’s fast-growing Internet TV and video age. Oversi’s solutions enable ISPs to optimize their network performance, ease P2P traffic pressure and save on bandwidth. The same Oversi platform also helps ISPs to increase revenues and enhance user stickiness through new value-added-services, such as premium content delivery and online storage.
Oversi focuses on service providers’ needs. Its aim is to enable them to utilize existing networks to best serve new customers’ demands for new services. Oversi believes the key to service provider success is not in limiting the customers but in being tuned to their needs and in providing the best service possible.
Oversi enables service providers to leverage new customer demands, presenting key user differentiators, maximizing market presence, and turning these demands into a new flow of revenues. Oversi also enables service providers to reduce operational expenses and increase revenues by providing profitable and improved services on existing infrastructure.
RawFlow is a leading provider of live P2P streaming technology that enables broadcasters, online communities, content delivery networks (CDNs), and webcasters to maximize the scalability and quality of their Internet broadcasts without increasing risk or cost.
RawFlow increases steaming quality and capacity by using the spare upstream capacity in the network. It offers a secure digital media delivery solution that supports digital rights management (DRM).
RawFlow’s technology allows the Internet to become a viable infrastructure for delivery of rich media content. It eliminates the success penalty that is normally associated with Internet broadcasting.
INTENT MediaWorks has quickly become a leader in digital media distribution by creating groundbreaking technologies and services. INTENT is the pioneer of authorized secure file trading and has helped usher in a new era of digital media by turning each file into a marketing tool for the copyright owner.
INTENT’s digital media distribution system is the most comprehensive available, reaching all major P2P file-sharing networks, web-based communities, as well as e-mail, RSS, and any channel on the Internet.
In addition, INTENT has developed a new model for lifestyle branding and viral social marketing that merges file-trading functionality with social network features, such as blogs, IM, VoIP, groups, and personal profiles. INTENT was named Best New Digital Technology at the 2006 Digital Music Conference and was the recipient of the 2006 DCIA Innovator’s Award.
Our 2007 theme is "Alternative Distribution" and the ITA Content Incubator will be showcasing new opportunities in mobile, IPTV, VOD, networked devices, and broadband television, plus peer-to-peer television (P2PTV) as represented by participating DCIA Members.
High-definition (HD) broadcast technology is coming into its own this year, which augurs well for future adoption of P2PTV, the most efficient way to transmit large files such as television programs and feature-length films.
DCIA Members look forward to presenting their new P2PTV service offerings to broadcasters at all levels; and the DCIA aims to facilitate securely protected and cost-effective online video distribution. Share wisely, and take care.
VeriSign Plans Registry Upgrades
Excerpted from WHIR Report by Liam Eagle
VeriSign has begun to discuss its plans for upgrading the infrastructure that supports registries and how it will ensure that registries live up to their considerable responsibilities.
Those responsibilities have increased significantly for VeriSign in the course of its operation of the .com and .net domains. The company has operated both registries with 100 percent uptime since 1999, while seeing registry query volume increase from roughly 1 billion per day to more than 30 billion per day during that time. Over the last several years, malicious attacks against the registry have increased 700 percent.
"We’ve always said," noted VeriSign spokesman Tom Galvin, "If the Internet went down, we’d have very different kinds of hearings, where we and the Department of Commerce and ICANN would be called up to explain how that happened. And that has a tendency to happen after the fact, as in the case of hurricane Katrina. There wasn’t a lot of scrutiny on the levies in New Orleans prior to Katrina. But there is now. Our goal is to try to make sure that we have an infrastructure in place with the kind of systems and processes where you never have an Internet Katrina. You’re never in a position where you have to explain, ‘why didn’t you do more?’"
VeriSign will enable the registry to do more now. With a system that absolutely must be up 100 percent of the time, any significant threat to the security or capacity of the infrastructure can demand an upgrade.
"We always try to have ten times, or a higher number, above and beyond the capacity we need," says Galvin, "So you might say ‘we have 100 times the capacity we need today,’ and then, with one attack you see 50 percent of that go away. We still have enough to deal with double that size attack. But now you’re not at double that, or triple that or at five times that. So what we continually have to do - and this ensures we have the resources to do that - is continually fortify and develop the Internet so that we can deal with the attacks and we can deal with the volume usage."
Galvin says the potential damage a DNS-level Internet outage could do is almost incalculable, and could reach almost every business in the world.
"The people who operate the thousands of small businesses out there," he says, "the thousands of corporations, the thousands of Internet users who have websites all want to know that their Internet is going to work. That they’re not going to go down. Millions of jobs are dependent on the Internet. Twenty-five percent of our economic value travels over the Internet every day. Livelihoods, from small businesses to large corporations, are based on the Internet working. And we’re part of that solution to making sure it works."
VeriSign’s enhancement plan goes by the name Project Titan, a program that by 2010 will see the company increase its capacity for DNS queries from 400 billion per day to 4 trillion per day. The company also intends to increase bandwidth capacity from 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) to more than 200 Gbps. The company will scale its infrastructure to include more than 100 regional Internet resolution sites, improving redundancy and reducing latency for the registries. Along with increased capacity, VeriSign is adding network operations centers to improve traffic management and developing new performance monitoring processes.
"We’re going to continue to invest in the infrastructure," says Galvin, "continue to ensure that it has the sustainability, the redundancy and the latency to continue to operate in a strong way."
That investment, and defending against that Internet disaster, is at the foundation of VeriSign’s deal with ICANN, and the reason that deal has become a template the organization is using in its contracts with the operators of registries for other top-level domains.
"I think the agreement as it was crafted," he says, "which ultimately became a template that they filed for us and they filed for Afilias and they filed for NeuStar and dot-mobi, was one that had three components to it. One, it held the registries accountable for their performance, so that we have to meet service level agreements. We have to keep the Internet operating at a really high level. Two, it gave those operators the ability to continue to invest in their infrastructure. And three, it gave consumers protection, because it ensured that there were limits on how much increases could go up."
QTRAX Highlighted in Jupiter Report
Jupiter Research, a leading authority on the impact of the Internet and emerging consumer technologies on business, has featured Brilliant Technologies’ ad-supported P2P music service, QTRAX, in a new report entitled The Future of Digital Music - Fighting Free with Free.
Jupiter analyst Mark Mulligan said, "Music spending continues to decline across Europe, and digital music revenues are modestly performing. Ad-supported music services are therefore becoming a viable means of driving digital music beyond its niche beginnings."
The 28-page report details the effects of the Internet and digital music upon the music industry and the resultant consistently declining paid music consumption among a generation conditioned to expect free music.
It details the viability of free ad-supported services and finds that "QTRAX has strong potential to both counter online copyright infringement and generate revenue from predominately young, low-spending music fans."
Highlighted in the key findings of the report is that, "The majority of European online music fans will not pay for digital music. Ad-supported music services such as QTRAX represent the key tool for converting Europe’s projected 57.7 million nonpaying digital music fans by 2011."
"We recommend this report from Jupiter Research as it addresses fundamental considerations for labels, artists, service providers, and investors," stated Allan Klepfisz, Chairman & CEO of Brilliant Technologies. "We feel that the music industry is on the cusp of a great revitalization and that QTRAX will play a critical role in that."
Cisco Systems’ Comeback Story
Excerpted from Red Herring Report
Is Cisco Systems trying to retake the title of innovation king of Silicon Valley from upstart Google?
From all appearances, yes. In the last few weeks, the networking giant spent more than $3 billion acquiring four Bay Area startups and has embarked on a global VC spending spree in exotic locales such as Moscow, Beijing, and Bangalore.
The fact that these acquisitions and VC investments have been made very public by Cisco, a notoriously quiet investor in new technology, spoke volumes to one analyst.
"Cisco’s pace of investment is kicking back into ‘90s-style high gear again," said William Lesieur, an analyst with Technology Business Research. "They are saying to the market, ‘we are still the premiere innovation company, whether organic or acquired.’"
Cisco has seen accolades go to Google in recent years, and the company is bent on changing that pattern, said Mr. Lesieur.
As a remedy, the San Jose, CA-based networking hardware giant has largely snapped up acquisitions that are so-called web 2.0 firms in recent weeks.
Cisco bought web app hosting firm Reactivity; two social networking software firms, Five Across and Utah Street Networks; and an on-demand app firm, WebEx.
On the global front, Cisco invested an undisclosed sum in Ozon, Russia’s Amazon.com, and last December invested $50 million in China Communications Services Corporation Limited, a state-run telecom firm.
Hilton Romanski, who heads Cisco’s global investment strategy, said Cisco’s VC investments in places like Russia are all part of the 22-year-old company’s midlife growth spurt.
"Our global VC investments help us understand technology shifts across different markets," Mr. Romanski said. "Our investments are a precursor to acquisitions."
While Cisco continues to acquire new technology almost exclusively in the Bay Area, Mr. Romanski believes that its VC investments in places like India, Russia, and eventually Latin America and Africa will break that homebound pattern.
"We are most successful with our acquisitions in markets where we have a critical mass of R&D capabilities or some significant presence on the ground," he said.
"We are now building that kind of presence in emerging markets primarily through VC investments," said Mr. Romanski. And India holds particular promise because of the engineering talent in that country, he added.
"India is both a compelling end market and a compelling source market," he said. "The technology and business models we develop there will be applicable to other emerging countries."
Pando Delivers P2PTV with Ads
Excerpted from Business 2.0 Report by Orli Yakuel
The problem with running a web video startup is that if a show gets too popular, the bandwidth costs of streaming it to people’s browsers or sending them big files through iTunes eats up a lot of cash.That’s why peer-to-peer television (P2PTV) systems like BitTorrent or Joost are so appealing.
Now Pando, a personal P2P file-sharing startup, is partnering with web video sites like Blip.tv to offset their bandwidth costs for video downloads.
Whenever you subscribe to a web video series through Apple’s iTunes, it is the video creators themselves who have to actually pay for the bandwidth needed to transfer those fat video files.With Pando’s P2P file-sharing software, which has been installed more than five million times and is actively used by about two million of those people in the last month, those bandwidth costs go away.
Pando Networks CEO Robert Levitan said, "We are trying to disrupt the entire downloadable media space. People should be able to download higher quality videos, like HD, and easily share them. With iTunes, the quality of many of the podcasts is poor and it is very difficult to share."
Levitan says that not only can Pando deliver HD-quality web videos, but it also makes it easy to share those videos with other Pando users. All of this is trackable, as are the ads that go with the videos.
So P2PTV can now become an ad-supported habit. Levitan is working with an ad-serving startup called PodBridge that is developing trackable ads for video downloads. And he says that major media companies are also lining up to support his technology.
He will need a lot of great content and millions more Pando users to loosen the grip of Apple’s iTunes on the video download market, but the savings on bandwidth alone could help Pando attract many of the video distributors it needs, both large and small.
Joost Adds CBS, GWR, and WMG
Joost, the P2PTV service that combines the best of television and the Internet, entered into agreements this week with CBS, Guinness World Record (GWR), and Warner Music Group (WMG).
CBS is bringing its stable of television shows, from "CSI" to "The Evening News with Katie Couric" to Joost. GWR is providing 35 hours of original programming to Joost, joining the growing list of content partners taking part in the service’s beta testing.
WMG is adding video content featuring its world-renowned roster of artists to the Joost platform. As part of the agreement, WMG and Joost will share revenue from advertising on WMG’s Joost channels.
Joost content partners share revenue from advertising in much the same way that television distributors share revenue with their rights holders. However, unlike traditional television advertising, the Joost platform creates significant opportunities for more targeted advertising by leveraging online capabilities. The Joost model is able to target a specific audience based on the viewer’s selected channel or program, geographic location, and individual preferences.
Joost has developed a secure business model that offers partners new ways to increase exposure for content and earn revenue while providing an opportunity to better understand and interact with viewers.
Vuze on Peer-to-Peer Television
Excerpted from C21 Media Report by Jonathan Webdale
This week, CBS gave its stamp of approval to P2PTV start-up Joost. But while Joost is still in beta testing, rival Azureus already has 10 million active users.
Like many companies springing up with claims of leading a revolution in online television, Azureus ticks all the boxes. It’s been operating a code-named service for some time and has now taken the wraps off of it to swap one suitably dotcom-esque moniker for another.
Zudeo became Vuze as of last week and with the new name came the announcement that Showtime was the latest partner to hop onboard, joining the likes of A&E, BBC Worldwide, National Geographic Ventures, and Starz Media.
Where Azureus differs from many other self-proclaimed online TV pioneers is that it already has 10 million active users, concentrated in the US and Western Europe, and its software has been downloaded 140 million times worldwide, with half a million being added to this total each week.
The US-based company has raised US $13.5 million so far from parties including Redpoint Ventures, also an investor in MySpace, TiVo, Netflix and MobiTV. Jarl Mohn, the former CEO of Liberty Digital and founding president of E! Entertainment, is among Azureus’ board members. The company’s chief executive is Gilles BianRosa, previously a consultant at McKinsey & Co and media and Internet specialist for Vivendi.
Azureus dates back to the end of 2003, when software engineer Bram Cohen released his BitTorrent P2P file-sharing tool to the web community.
Azureus picked up the BitTorrent software, adapting it and packaging it last December into a consumer-facing service called Zudeo. This has now been renamed Vuze ahead of a full-blown consumer assault.
Cohen, meanwhile, together with Ashwin Navin, has taken the BitTorrent brand and launched his own service under this name, offering 5,000 TV and film titles from the likes of MGM, Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate, MTV Networks, and Paramount Pictures, mostly on a download-to-own or download-to-rent basis.
While Vuze is using the same underlying P2P technology, BianRosa says that where the service differs from the BitTorrent Entertainment Network and other services like CinemaNow and Movielink in that its focus is not on sell-through but providing an open forum for large media companies, hobbyists, and amateurs alike to share their creative efforts.
"If you decide to monetize your content on our platform, we do a revenue share, whether electronic sell-through, video-on-demand (VOD), or ad-supported. If you decide to not monetize it, we won’t charge you. We are a platform for exchange with an option for monetization, rather than being a store," he says.
In contrast to P2PTV start-ups Joost and Babelgum, Vuze is also a pure download service, meaning that once users have stored their chosen program on their PC or laptop, they can take it with them and watch it anywhere, without the need for an Internet connection. It is also focusing on HD programming aimed at a large existing user-base.
"Our demographic is 18- to 34-year-olds, 70% employed. They are early adopters of new media trends and 25% of them are on social networks like MySpace," said BianRosa.
"When we asked them what they like to watch they told us action, sci-fi, anime and cult. We don’t want to be niche but we want to enable niches. In order to put our best foot forward we’re starting with our existing user base and we can reach out to a broader demographic from there."
From this perspective, the BBC Worldwide tie-up, which came in December and has recently been extended, was particularly significant. The deal, which is restricted to the US, brought titles like offbeat comedy "The Mighty Boosh" and sci-fi series including "Doctor Who" and "Red Dwarf" to Vuze, but also more mainstream fair - contemporary sitcom "Coupling" and the classic "Fawlty Towers," all priced at 99 cents per episode.
"We’re looking for branded content that people will recognize but still has some sort of cult following, that people feel passionate for, and for us the BBC was a perfect example of that," said BianRosa. It’s all about playing to the Internet’s strengths - focusing on the interests of early adopters before broadening the slate as online TV consumption becomes a more mainstream activity. He takes Starz Media as an example.
"They’re in the sci-fi anime category, where the content itself has fan sites over the Internet. People love it, and yet it’s still hard to find. You could argue that Starz is not a very big name, but if you’re a big fan of anime then ‘Ghost in the Shell’ is definitely something that you will know," explained BianRosa.
He admits that bringing content to the Vuze audience can sometimes be a laborious process, since in the main the TV establishment has simply not been ready to make the transition to online distribution. The question of rights is still a huge issue as is the availability of high quality digital copies of programs. He recalls Azureus reps having to fly over to see content partners and bring back content so the company could upload it themselves. But things are changing rapidly, said BianRosa.
"Most cable networks understand that we’re not a threat, we’re an opportunity, which is why we’re doing these deals with them. Their audience used to be in front of their TV and now they’re in front of their computer, using Azureus or something else and so the idea behind these partnerships is to say ‘why don’t we move our content to where our users are moving as opposed to trying to get them back to the TV?’
"That said, it’s not without friction and in many media companies you have a fight going on between people who really understand how the digital marketplace is going to work and people who don’t. But every time I meet with these companies I see that struggle making progress towards the right direction."
Raketu Adds Jabber Instant Messaging
Raketu Communications, the global Internet communications, information, and entertainment company, this week announced immediate availability of its updated Multi-Messenger that now includes support for Jabber instant messaging (IM), in addition to already supporting Google, Skype, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and ICQ, in its suite of voice and text communication options.
Raketu includes high-quality voice calling, SMS-text messaging, file transfers/sharing, news, sports, weather, stock feeds, an advanced Internet and travel searching facility, podcast reader, and a full featured multi-media player. Raketu also includes its recently announced interactive P2PTV and video-on-demand (VOD) offerings.
"With the addition of Jabber support, we continue to deliver on expanding our communications service offerings, and bringing Raketu one step closer to universal access from a single product," said Greg Parker, President of Raketu.
"We currently provide Raketu users a single interface where they can directly access all their voice calling, IM/SMS exchanges, and P2PTV streaming video viewing in a single integrated application."
Raketu uses a unique P2P technology, which allows the highest quality VoIP calling and the highest VoIP call-completion without the security issues associated with super-nodes and other traditional VoIP services/P2P technologies.
Raketu currently has over a million consumers using its voice over IP (VoIP), P2PTV streaming video, and other services globally. Free to download and use, Raketu enables computers to be full-featured world-wide communications, information, and entertainment tools.
Nettwerk Honored by Canada
Nettwerk Music Group, which leads the music industry in pioneering online distribution including via P2P technologies, was honored this week by Canada’s New Government. Two government Ministers, Beverley Oda and Chuck Strahl, announced the award of $650,000 for Nettwerk Productions. This funding will enable the Vancouver-based music company to continue working with Canadian artists to enrich Canada’s musical experience.
"Canada’s New Government is pleased to provide support to this record company to ensure that our citizens have access to a wide variety of Canadian musical options," said Minister Oda. "I encourage Nettwerk Productions to continue its excellent work, which contributes to the richness and diversity of our culture."
"I am proud that our Government is supporting Nettwerk Productions’ efforts to develop, promote and distribute works by talented Canadian songwriters such as Sarah McLachlan, the Be Good Tanya, the Great Lake Swimmers, and many others," said Minister Strahl. "This support will help Nettwerk continue to offer music fans a wide selection of exceptional Canadian music."
Canada’s New Government is providing this contribution through the Department of Canadian Heritage’s Music Entrepreneur component of the Canada Music Fund. The component enables a greater number of established Canadian music entrepreneurs to offer a diverse range of musical choices, become increasingly competitive internationally, and prepare to succeed in a digitized global environment.
New P2P System Speeds Downloads
A Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist says transferring large data files, such as movies and music, over the Internet could be sped up significantly if P2P file-sharing services were configured to share not only identical files, but also similar files.
David G. Andersen, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, and Michael Kaminsky of Intel Research Pittsburgh have designed such a system, called Similarity-Enhanced Transfer (SET). By identifying relevant chunks of files similar to a desired file, SET greatly increases the number of potential sources for downloads. And boosting the number of sources usually translates into faster P2P downloads, Andersen explains.
How much SET could speed up downloads varies based on a number of factors, including the size and popularity of a given file. In some cases, SET might speed transfers by just 5 percent; in others, it might make downloads five times faster.
The researchers, along with graduate student Himabindu Pucha of Purdue University, presented a paper describing SET and release the system code at the 4th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, April 11th in Cambridge, MA.
"This is a technique that I would like people to steal," Andersen said. Though he and his colleagues hope to implement SET in a service for sharing software or academic papers, they have no intention of applying it themselves to movie- or music-sharing services. "But it would make P2P transfers faster and more efficient," he added, "and developers should just take the idea and use it in their own systems."
"In some sense, the promise of P2P has been greater than the reality," Andersen said. By creating many more sources for data files, P2P reduces bottlenecks for data transfers. But residential ISPs allot far more bandwidth for downloading than they do for uploading files, an imbalance that continues to slow P2P data transfers. And members of P2P services often limit their computer’s upload capacity so it is not tied up with other peoples’ uploads.
Like P2P services such as BitTorrent, Gnutella, and ChunkCast, SET speeds up data transfers by simultaneously downloading different chunks of a desired data file from multiple sources, rather than downloading an entire file from one slow source. Even then, downloads can be slow because these networks can’t find enough sources to use all of a receiver’s download bandwidth. That’s why SET takes the additional step of identifying files that are similar to the desired file.
No one knows the degree of similarity between data files stored in computers around the world, but analyses suggest the types of files most commonly shared are likely to contain a number of similar elements. Many music files, for instance, may differ only in the artist-and-title headers, but are otherwise 99 percent similar. Different versions of software packages likewise remain highly similar.
Taking advantage of those similarities could speed downloads considerably. If a US computer user wanted to download a German-language version of a popular movie, for instance, existing systems would probably download most of the movie from sources in Germany. But if the user could download from similar files, the user could retrieve most of the video from English versions readily available from US sources, and download only the audio portion of the movie from the German sources.
SET’s basic operation is similar to that of BitTorrent. Once the download of a data file is initiated, the source file is divided into smaller, unique chunks – SET divides a one-gigabyte file into 64,000 16-kilobyte chunks, for instance. Different chunks are downloaded simultaneously from numerous sources that have the identical file, and then the chunks are reassembled into a single file.
But while that process of downloading is under way, SET continues to search for similar files using a process called hand-printing, inspired by techniques that have been used for clustering search results or detecting spam. A sampling technique is used to see if non-identical files contain chunks matching those of the desired file. Relevant chunks can then be downloaded from the similar files identified by this method.
In tests based upon real files downloaded from today’s peer-to-peer networks, SET improved the transfer time of an MP3 music file by 71 percent. A larger 55-megabyte movie trailer went 30 percent faster using the researchers’ techniques to draw from movie trailers that were 47 percent similar. The researchers hope that the efficiency gains from SET will enable the next generation of high-speed online multimedia delivery.
AT&T Offers Customers Free HD
High-definition (HD) TV programming is fast becoming the nation’s new must-have entertainment enhancement, and qualifying AT&T video customers can now enjoy it free for a year.
AT&T announced this week that it would offer video customers one year of free HDTV if they subscribe to its U-verse service or its co-branded services offered through DirecTV and EchoStar. "I think it’s a pretty innovative offer," said Vince Vittore, a senior analyst with The Yankee Group.
AT&T said the free offer was valued at $240 a year, and is one of the first consumer promotions the company is featuring across its AT&T and former BellSouth footprint. AT&T’s TV services are available in a 22-state footprint.
"With a growing lineup of more than 25 HD channels in each market, we have a very competitive, robust offering, and our HD-compatible boxes are included in the monthly programming package cost," said AT&T spokesman Brad Mays. "Add to these advantages current features like fast channel change, the ability to record up to four programs at once, web remote access to the DVR, built-in picture-in-picture browsing functionality on any TV, and future options like whole-home DVR and wireless remote access to program your DVR with your AT&T wireless phone, and then you can see why U-verse is such a compelling product."
"AT&T’s key advantage over cable is the wireless element of the package," Vittore said. "Cable can do everything that U-verse can as it stands now except for allowing people to watch video from their DVRs with a wireless device in a mobile environment. The technology is there for cable operators and Sprint, but there are legal issues on who gets what in the cost structure. There are also content issues, but AT&T has all of it in place under one name."
Javien Licenses MeoMedia’s Qode
Javien Digital Payment Solutions has entered into a transaction fee based license agreement for the qode platform, an innovative direct-to-mobile-web technology solution from NeoMedia Technologies.
The pioneering qode solution allows consumers to interact with products and services in the physical world using barcodes allowing for content and products to be consumed.
Javien will incorporate the power of the NeoMedia qode platform into its persuasive Total Commerce Solution allowing for a complete billing, couponing, and content product acquisition and resolution offering. NeoMedia will earn $0.05 per click and expects each transaction to generate up to four clicks.
"Online and brick and mortar merchants are looking for ways to maximize sales and bridge the digital world to the physical world, and qode will allow us to expand our services to markets and customers in the physical world," said Leslie Poole, Javien’s CEO.
M-Bit Mobile P2P File Sharing
Excerpted from CNET News Report
M-Bit Network is "the world’s first next-gen P2P experience in search, file sharing, and super distribution through mobile networks," according to Eugene Goh, CEO of mTouche Technology, which announced M-Bit’s pre-launch this week. Currently, P2P technology has been limited to the sharing of content files stored in computers over fixed-wired networks. The launch of M-Bit Network represents a significant milestone for mobile technologies.
"M-Bit Network is the first of its kind because it allows the P2P sharing of content files between mobile phones and via transmission over wireless mobile networks," said Eugene Goh.
For a start, the focus will be skewed toward buy-in from both handset manufacturers and mobile network operators from Japan and Korea, where "4th Generation (4G) mobile networks are already established", giving the company a platform for the launch of M-Bit Network.
The primary target market is Japan, one of the world’s largest and most advanced mobile environments with a population of more than 100 million subscribers.
"We aim to launch M-Bit Network with at least one major carrier in Japan by the end of 2007 with a target user base of 1 million subscribers, which is roughly 1 percent of the current mobile user population in Japan," Goh added.
It is understood that there will be a standard subscription fee in line with the average fee of mobile value-added services readily offered in Japan.
Being a regional key player in mobile messaging technologies and interactive media applications, mTouche intends to leverage the launch of M-Bit Network to further solidify its position as the world’s first global P2P search and file super distribution network that works across both wireless and wired networks for Mobile Web 2.0, rich media, and advertising services.
M-Bit Network users will be able to browse through music or video files stored on other mobile phones, besides downloading authorized files into their own handsets. Users may even broadcast content to friends once they have obtained new ready-to-share files.
M-Bit client software facilitates key features such as share and search, download manager, group manager, podcasting, chatting, and the M-Bit control server, which acts as a centralized tracking system for administrators to monitor files that are being downloaded or shared, for reporting and billing.
ShareMonkey Monetizes File Sharing
Excerpted from NewTeeVee Report
File sharing can help artists move units, and a new tool from leadbullet makes it even easier for consumers to make the connection between an unofficial download and an official cash purchase.
ShareMonkey is a small application for Windows and plug-in for Shareaza that allows users to query their database for an authorized distributor of a piece of media, including music and video.
ShareMonkey makes the process as simple as right-clicking and choosing "Where is this file from?" in Windows.
According to its site, "We’ve matched more than 200,000 P2P movies, cams, rips, trailers, and extras, to the DVDs they originally came from, and we’re matching more every day."
ShareMonkey also allows users to correct results by finding the source themselves if there isn’t a match in the database. Digital watermarking and cooperation from content distributors would also greatly help refine their results.
Eventually one might download a cam version of the latest Hollywood movie and use ShareMonkey to find a local theater to see it on the big screen with friends. It’s certainly a new approach to enabling consumers — punishing a small number of infringers hasn’t worked, so maybe rewarding passionate fans looking to support their favorite artists will.
Jack In The Box BitTorrent Hardware
A new dedicated BitTorrent device has been introduced in Japan that can operate on its own, independently of any PC or Mac in the network, to provide full network attached storage with two SATA bays and 1.5 TB maximum capacity. The new piece of hardware is called Jack In The Box MZK-NAS02 and currently sells for $333.
The NAS and BitTorrent functions can be administered using any web browser. Jack In The Box supports hard drive hot swapping and RAID 0 or 1, which is not as sophisticated as a Drobo, but will keep all audio and video files safe while being fully Digital Living Network Alliance v1.0 compliant. In addition to the obligatory Gigabit Ethernet port. The Jack In The Box also has a secure digital multimedia card slot.
Damaka Adds DialIn & DialWorld
Damaka, a fast-growing P2P SIP software company, launched DialIn and DialWorld services to complement its communication and collaboration product suite. According to CEO Siva Ravikumar, "Damaka is the enabler that allows an operator, service provider, or enterprise to launch a complete voice service using a scalable, secure, and low-cost P2P solution. By licensing the damaka platform, practically anyone can become a Virtual Network Operator (VNO) in less than 30 days." DialIn provides a user with a "follow me" number regardless of where he or she is in the world. A person living in London, for example, can give her US-based friends and family a local US number which can be routed to her damaka client in the UK. The friends and family enjoy the cost savings and convenience of remembering a local number while the damaka user is anywhere in the world. With DialWorld, the end user enjoys a phone to phone calling service with the same low rate as in DialOut PC to phone service.
DialIn and DialWorld are the latest additions to damaka’s feature releases which include Desktop sharing, Video-mail, Universal Instant Messaging and White-boarding.
Important News from Indie911
By Indie911 CEO Justin Goldberg
Lately, Indie911 has been in the press quite a bit because of the surge of attention from the recent launch of our hoooka player - a tool that enables artists and fans to play, share, promote and sell their favorite digital media by creating a personalized store and player anywhere they wish to embed the code - blogs, websites, and social networking sites.
Some of the press attention has been nice, and although we like to say here in Hollywood that "any press is good press" - there have been some potentially misleading articles and blogs about us and I thought the time was right to point out a few things to our growing community.
Some articles have framed Indie911 as part of the recent wave of "commercial applications" or "widgets" devised solely to profit from traffic on MySpace. For those Indie911 members with us since the beginning - nearly three years ago when our site was truly one of the first online social networking sites that streamed independent music - this is a particularly stinging and inaccurate description of our network and its history of providing resources for the music and film community.
As most of you know, Indie911 is not a "commercial application" - it is a free streaming music discovery network and a leading artist services organization working in step with both independent and major label artists, record companies, and music festivals. The hoooka is unique in that it can be both a personalized streaming player of legal music and video AND/OR a store, while maintaining an inter-site live chat function. We embrace this platform because it realizes the full potential of the online experience, beyond a specific site that a user may be on.
So what’s on Indie911? Create and share playlists and music stores with the hoooka. Watch exclusive interviews, videos, or upload your own. Live chat on every page. Artist tour dates. Network and find friends. Promotional tools and resources for artists and labels.
On behalf of the more than 100,000 artists, labels, filmmakers and fans who make up the Indie911 community, thank you for your attention and for being a valued part of the Indie911 experience.
Media Moguls Head for Web
Excerpted from MediaPost Report
Just about every media company in the world is trying to figure out a way into the world of social networks, blogs, and online video. Several, like Google, News Corp. and NBC Universal, have bought their way into Web 2.0, while others, like Viacom, are choosing to build it.
Critics might say that due to their size, big media companies are at a disadvantage when it comes to the fast-paced world of new media. Several former media moguls have abandoned the traditional world in favor of growing their own web startups.
Michael Eisner, the former CEO of the Walt Disney Company, has produced a new online series called "Prom Queen," featuring all the stuff you’d expect from reality television: beautiful girls and guys, sexual innuendo and a secret: one of the suitors is out to kill the prom queen. Business Week says the acting is terrible, but the show is mildly addicting. Eisner recently struck a distribution deal with MySpace for the series.
Steven Bochco, the producer of "LA Law" and "Hill Street Blues," has signed on to create several videos for user-generated site Metacafe.com.
Herb Scannell, former president of Viacom’s Nickelodeon Networks, founded Next New Networks, a month-old startup that intends to create 101 specialized networks over the next five years.
Coming Events of Interest
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National Association of Broadcasters (NAB2007) – April 16th–19th in Las Vegas, NV. Whether you’re making the transition to HD; looking to invest in new technologies like P2PTV; seeking new tools to create content and build revenue streams; or just trying to stay ahead of the competition, NAB2007 is your essential destination. The DCIA is participating in the ITA Content Incubator.
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MUSEXPO – An unprecedented group of global entertainment executives will congregate in West Hollywood, CA April 29th - May 2nd for A&R WORLDWIDE’s international music and media forum. Designated "a united nations of the music industry," top tier music, media and technology global executives unite to participate in a series of timely industry forums kicked-off by a round-table keynote event moderated by Emmy Award-winning CNN host Larry King.
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Streaming Media East - The Business & Technology of Online Video - May 15th-16th at the Hilton New York, NY. Streaming Media East is the only trade show dedicated to coverage of both the business of video on the net and the technology of streaming, downloading, IPTV and mobile video delivery. The DCIA is a show sponsor, and DCIA Member BUYDRM’s Christopher Levy will speak on the P2P for Large Scale Video Delivery panel.
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P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LA – June 11th in Santa Monica, CA. This is the DCIA’s must-attend event for everyone interested in P2P. Keynotes, panels, and workshops on the latest breakthroughs. Held in conjunction with the new Digital Hollywood Spring conference and exposition.
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Digital Hollywood Spring – June 12th–14th in Santa Monica, CA. Now expanded to Le Merigot as well as Loews Anatole Hotel. With many new sessions and feature events, this has become the premiere digital entertainment conference and expositions. DCIA Members will exhibit and speak on a number of panels.
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NXTcomm – June 18th–20th in Chicago, IL. The next-generation global forum and marketplace for the business of information, communications, and entertainment technology. The forces that drive communication and the solutions to harness it converge here. The DCIA will participate with Digital Hollywood.
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International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) – September 6th-11th in Amsterdam, Holland. IBC is committed to providing the world’s best event for everyone involved in the creation, management, and delivery of content for the entertainment industry, including DCIA Members. Run by the industry for the industry, convention organizers are drawn from participating companies.
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PT/EXPO COMM – October 23rd-27th at the China International Exhibition Center in Beijing, China. The largest telecommunications/IT industry event in the world’s fastest growing telecom sector. PT/EXPO COMM offers DCIA participants from all over the world a high profile promotional platform in a sales environment that is rich in capital investment.
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