July 21, 2008
Volume XXII, Issue 11
P2P Set-top Boxes to Revolutionize Internet
Excerpted from Slashdot Report
The European Commission's 7th Framework Program (FP7) is working on a project called Nano Data Centers (NADA) as part of its future Internet initiative.
NADA will seek to build an Internet architecture that delivers data from the edge of the Internet using set-top boxes (STBs) and peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, instead of the network-centric architecture that stores and delivers content from data centers via Internet backbones.
NADA is proposing a network of STBs to be essentially split into two - one side the user interface, the other a virtualized P2P storage client that stores and sends media in the same way a data center would.
Ideally there would be millions of these boxes each acting as a mini-data-center - hence the Nano Data Center moniker.
The NADA project is convincing enough to have attracted some of Europe's largest telecommunications companies. STB manufacturer, Thomson SA, and European ISP, Telefonica Group, are among nine contributing partners to the NADA project.
NADA could see a dramatic reduction in the size and frequency of data centers that serve all kinds of media over the Internet.
P2P Networks: The State of the Art
A new report from Generator Research opens by summarizing 17 different P2P content delivery network (CDN) platforms and services that use peer-to-peer to deliver streaming video content.
The content delivery market is reviewed by looking at 7 different market segments, the size and growth potential of the Internet television segment, and the incremental traffic requirements demanded by this market segment.
Using a detailed network example, the report explains why P2P technology will have a sustainable position in the CDN marketplace, and why this is not because some P2P CDNs are offering seemingly massive cost savings to content service providers.
The report then analyzes the effect that different P2P CDN architectures (i.e., localized and non-localized) have on ISPs, and explains what ISPs are doing to deal with undesirable, non-localized traffic.
Next, the report lays out the top-level requirements that a successful commercial P2P CDN will need to meet, including considerations such as quality and performance, central management functions, content security, and traffic localization.
The report then explains the basics of how modern, packet-based P2P CDNs work by addressing issues such as peer-selection algorithms, the role of caching servers, and the viability of pure P2P systems. Some future technological developments are also discussed.
Finally, the report reviews the P4P Working Group (P4PWG) and P2P-Next, which are the two market initiatives that have the greatest potential to transform how P2P CDN technology evolves in the future.
Cable & Telco P4P Tests Go Well
Excerpted from Washington Telecom Newswire Report by Jonathan Make
Tests of a way to speed P2P file transfers and similar bandwidth-intensive use of Internet service provider (ISP) facilities are proceeding well, said participants.
The trials, involving about a half dozen cable operators and telcos, go further than an earlier round and could be finished at month's end, with full results presented later, Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) CEO Marty Lafferty said.
Both he and Pando Networks' CEO Robert Levitan said the data should show that P4P - a standard letting networks owned by various ISPs communicate with P2P applications - works on both cable and telco networks using Pando's product, and reduces network capacity used by P2P applications.
Comcast and Verizon had gone public about participating, and AT&T now is doing the same, said Lafferty and Levitan.
Tests are likely to find that P4P works as well on cable broadband networks as on DSL or fiber-based networks, Levitan said. Preliminary results and methods likely will be presented August 4th at the P2P MEDIA SUMMIT Silicon Valley in San Jose, CA, Lafferty and Levitan said.
Initial presentations may not show how P4P affected specific ISPs since participants may not want to publicize results until they've had a chance to fully review and analyze them, they said.
The next round of tests, slated for fall, may involve P2P applications other than Pando, said Lafferty and Levitan. Kontiki, LimeWire, and Vuze likely will take part, they said.
Abacast and PeerApp are among other P2P vendors who've expressed interest, said Levitan.
"We're still recruiting participants," Lafferty said.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 The questions I've been asked most this week have been about the DCIA's recently announced program to protect file sharers from inadvertently distributing personal or sensitive data.
The President's Identity Theft Task Force (PITTF), co-chaired by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and involving 17 federal agencies with special expertise in this area, has provided leadership for 96 related task forces and working groups since May 2006.
Among thousands of cases cited in the initial PITTF fact sheet, none involved P2P. File sharing was not considered as a potential risk, because its impact had been minimal, if not nonexistent, in contrast to more prevalent threats.
The DCIA's very focused initiative in this area was stimulated, rather, by the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Hearing on Inadvertent File Sharing over P2P Networks in July 2007.
The Committee, chaired by Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA), has been very vigilant in its attention to P2P-related matters, often in advance of other governmental bodies.
Even before that hearing, the DCIA offered to work with Congressman Waxman's Committee, and prior to that, with the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), to address concerns raised in its March 2007 report focusing on unintended data redistribution by P2P users.
According to Javelin Strategy & Research, identity (ID) theft costs US businesses and consumers in excess of fifty billion dollars per year.
Of this amount, to date, the DOJ has prosecuted only one case associated with P2P file sharing, where the total losses were $73,000. But that does not mean this potential threat should be ignored or under-estimated by the emerging P2P industry.
In about one-fifth of stolen ID cases, the Internet plays a part in perpetrating the crime. Thus far, in such instances, the means have tended to be more directly related to the intentions of the criminal than would have been the case in user-error of P2P software programs.
Of all Internet-based activity, phishing scams involving a combination of e-mail and fraudulent websites - whose average time in operation is less than three days - pose by far the greatest danger to consumers as possible sources of online ID theft, and are the most difficult to prosecute.
There are in total an estimated 15 million US ID theft cases per year, but again, only one has been associated with a criminal abusing a P2P file-sharing application to search for data that consumers may have uploaded in error.
While addressing this issue now will truly be a pre-emptive strike, it will also demonstrate the P2P industry's ability to be both responsive and responsible; and some of this work should be transferable to other areas.
Leading P2P file-sharing software developers take the issue of the safety and security of their users very seriously, and were willing to voluntarily invest their time and resources to work with government officials proactively to confront this concern - before it became a serious problem.
Moreover, the DCIA believed that protection against inadvertently sharing personal or sensitive data represented an actionable item that could reasonably be addressed given certain unique attributes of P2P file-sharing programs.
Recent high-profile incidents have underscored the timeliness of this decision, as well as the related need for employers and their IT departments to enforce controls on work computers.
Therefore, in the wake of the Committee hearing, we established the Inadvertent Sharing Protection Working Group (ISPG) and facilitated demos by industry leaders for federal agency representatives focusing on application features intended to protect users from inadvertently sharing data.
Parties then frankly discussed the challenges of the evolving marketplace for file-sharing programs. Next, the DCIA endorsed the Onguard Online website pages dedicated to P2P File-Sharing Safety.
And finally, a work product was initiated that, after an iterative process, would culminate in the set of principles that form the basis for the new industry-wide program. More information about this program will be available at the upcoming P2P MEDIA SUMMIT Silicon Valley.
Above all, this year-long effort reflected an exemplary collaboration among leading P2P companies and other technology sector participants along with US regulatory authorities.
The ISPG remained within the scope of its subject matter based on our experience that in order to be successful, such working groups need well-defined project goals, non-overlapping participant roles, and clear procedures in order to achieve their respective missions.
It's important also to note that the DCIA has separate ongoing initiatives focused on such issues as deterring copyright infringement and combating the redistribution of criminally obscene content (please see www.P2Ppatrol.com), which are two examples of other very critical activities.
Of these, the most challenging area continues to be protecting copyrighted works. This is due to a host of legacy reasons, inherent complexities with associated technological requirements, and complications that continue to make it problematic for key contributors to directly participate.
Adding to the degree of difficulty, standards-and-practices efforts such as these must remain voluntary in order to comply with anti-trust laws in the US and other jurisdictions. Participation in working groups must be open publicly to qualified participants. Adherence to their work products must also be the unilateral decision of each individual company or organization.
The P2P industry has changed enormously since 2003, with a much greater emphasis now on more sophisticated services than the kind of rudimentary file-sharing application Napster introduced.
Today we have a panoply of robust commercial P2P offerings, hybrid P2P content delivery networks (CDNs), peer-to-peer television (P2PTV) applications, live P2P streaming solutions, mobile P2P technologies, etc.
The consumer marketplace is at long last being offered promising and competitive P2P-based licensed content distribution models for paid downloads, subscriptions, and ad-supported delivery.
The three "Fs" that are important to the development of this distribution channel - file-protection, filtering, and network forensics - are progressing as well with many solutions on the market today.
In the post MGM v. Grokster era, P2P software developers and distributors are successfully advancing services that appeal to consumers and serve the interests of all participants in the delivery chain.
We are very grateful especially to ISPG industry participants and regulatory agency representatives, who worked hard on a worthwhile project, and also to industry observers, whose critical comments are useful in pointing out issues that need additional attention to facilitate commercial advancement. Share wisely, and take care.
DCIA Program for Inadvertent File Sharing
Excerpted from Washington Internet Daily Report by Greg Piper
The P2P industry has released voluntary best practices aimed at limiting chances of sensitive material leaking onto the Internet. The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), known recently for working with ISPs to reduce the bandwidth load of file sharing, worked with P2P companies and regulators on the principles, which largely aim to make file sharing intentional and transparent.
The industry was spurred to devise rules for default settings, warnings, and limits on sharing in response to a House Oversight Committee hearing last year, said DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty. He said, most "open" P2P companies - those allowing user-to-user transfer - were involved, although some have since ceased operations. He also said the DCIA and P2P companies talked more with agency officials than with Congress in developing the program.
Participants in the best practices are expected to keep "user-originated files" from being shared by default following installation. These include files a user didn't download via P2P software, such as Excel spreadsheets. Users must be able to turn-off sharing totally or disable sharing in certain folders through a one-click mechanism "from any screen in the user interface," the principles say.
"Recursive sharing," or the automatic sharing of subfolders in a designated parent folder, must be activated by a user's "affirmative steps," not by default. Users trying to share "sensitive folders," such as My Documents in Windows, must get warnings, and sharing of a complete drive is blocked.
"Sensitive file types," like Microsoft Office program files and PDF documents, can be shared only by affirmative steps, after a user marks user-originated files for sharing. Warnings must be displayed before sharing a great number of files or subfolders, the best practices say.
P2P developers must make "best efforts" to get existing users to upgrade software with the sharing protections, and leave users' chosen settings unchanged in future upgrades.
An optional section recommends that P2P makers offer the choice of fully disconnecting from the P2P network or letting it run in the background, with an alert such as a system tray icon.
The principles tend to avoid specific limits on sharing, or how to restrict sharing. "It's important to let developers have flexibility in how they want to implement the program so they can optimize it for their respective user bases," Lafferty said. "We wanted to keep it conceptual, keep it functional."
That's why companies aren't required to, say, add the features in a routine update to existing software, but rather can ask users to download the latest version of software.
The DCIA is giving participating companies until year-end to line up behind the best practices, and will check periodically on compliance, he said.
The group moved several provisions from the "optional" category to mandatory as talks progressed, Lafferty added. After the six-month grace period ends, the DCIA will evaluate the need for other changes, he said.
P2P-Next Introduces Live BitTorrent Streaming
Excerpted from TorrentFreak Report
The SwarmPlayer developed by the P2P-Next research group is now capable of streaming live video in true 4th generation P2P style using a zero-server approach. With a $22 million project budget from the EU and partners, the P2P-Next research group intends to redefine how video is viewed on the Internet.
This new breakthrough technology allows everyone to broadcast a live stream, such as a webcam feed, to thousands of people, using approximately the same amount of bandwidth they would use to stream to one or two people.
With SwarmPlayer, the user can simply click on a "live" .torrent file and tune into any live BitTorrent channel. To make this possible, the P2P-Next research group created a new .tstream format which is a regular .torrent with live capability.
The BBC is one of the parties currently testing the new BitTorrent streaming format, which is part of the P2P-Next project. The Scientific Director of the project, Johan Pouwelse, told TorrentFreak that it's not just the BBC interested in this new technology: "We are working with a lot of interested parties. Through the European Broadcasting Union we are getting a lot of feedback. We are expected to do more field trials in the near future."
If the technology turns out to be a success, broadcasters can save millions of dollars each year on video streaming projects. ISPs on the other hand will be less excited, because they now pay for this bandwidth. Most importantly, however, is that this technology allows individuals to broadcast their streams to thousands of users, without having to invest in lots of bandwidth.
Pouwelse further told TorrentFreak that, unlike services such as Joost, they are fully committed to open standard and open source. "As a research project we, by definition, need to make things that others don't already have, without needing to worry about business models," he said, going on to explain how they got live streaming via BitTorrent to work.
"To be relevant, we remain BitTorrent-compatible," Pouwelse said. "However, traditional BitTorrent is not compatible with streaming. We solved this problem by dropping the tit-for-tat protocol and making something which is more generic, which we call Give-to-Get."
Give-to-Get tries to obtain video blocks just-in-time for displaying. Tit-for-tat rewards people that give bandwidth to you, which does not work in the streaming case. Instead, Give-to-Get gives bandwidth to people that are nice to others. This is more powerful, but proved to be quite tricky to get working.
Indeed, streaming a webcam feed is totally different from downloading a huge video file. What the SwarmPlayer does is download and buffer one minute's worth of data, which is then traded with other people in the swarm. The users are actively trading the buffered data.
A key breakthrough was that Dr. Arno Bakker got the undownload functionality working. This is needed, because the player has to drop data after a while, since you're watching a continuous stream. This turned out to require momentous revamping of 7-year-old code.
For those who want to test the BitTorrent live streaming, there is a streaming test where you can tune-in to a webcam in Amsterdam, or a five-minute weather report from the BBC. You can provide feedback and check-out some of the statistics here. More details about how to set up your own BitTorrent live stream are available here.
The SwarmPlayer and the BitTorrent live streaming technology are still works in progress. "We hope that we can get this code solid and stable in a month," Pouwelse said. "Then we can focus on the next milestone of sharing ratio enforcement, where we give better video experience to those that upload more."
Sky and Sony Launch P2PTV Portal
UK pay TV operator BSkyB and Sony have launched Go!View, a paid online video service for the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) games system.
The joint venture provides a mixture of sport highlights, TV, and movie content available on either a subscription (sport and TV shows) or digital rental basis (movies and TV shows).
Three subscription packs are available and content is grouped thematically as comedy, entertainment, and sports; and users can trial all three packs free for a month.
Go!View includes content from ABC/Disney, BBC Worldwide, Sony Pictures Television, NBC Universal, National Geographic, and Sky Sports.
The service is based on Kontiki's P2P delivery system and requires users to download an application, have a Windows PC with Windows Media Player 11 and a PSP with a memory stick that supports Sony's MagicGate content protection system.
Go!View is available in the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
P2PTV Rivals Expand Their Reach
Excerpted from Business Week Report by Jennifer Schenker
Ten months ago, while competitors such as Joost concentrated on the US and European markets, Babelgum, a free, global peer-to-peer television (P2PTV) video-on-demand (VOD) service, was looking east, with plans to add Chinese language content.
Fast forward to summer of 2008 and Babelgum is branching out into the US while Joost strikes deals in Japan. That said, the two companies are continuing to follow very different trajectories.
On July 16th, Babelgum announced that it is opening a US office. It has hired two media-savvy US executives, Ethan Podell and Michael Rosen. A television industry veteran of nearly 30 years, Podell worked for HBO and CBS and also founded and managed several start-ups. Rosen has worked for Bloomberg, News Corp.'s New Digital Media Group, and Showtime Networks.
The goal, says the company, is to become one of the leading TV platforms in the US for independent content. Babelgum appears to be off to a respectable start. It registered 210,000 unique users in the US in April, according to Comscore, which studies Internet use. Babelgum, which was founded by Italian billionaire Silvio Scaglia, a successful Internet and telecom entrepreneur, is also adding eyeballs in the rest of the world. The company says it is confident that it can achieve one million viewers by year's end.
Both Babelgum and Joost, which was created by the founders of Skype, use P2P streaming technology to deliver TV-quality video and audio over the Internet.
Both also require users to download software to view the available library of content. Where Babelgum differs is that it has no wish to replicate mainstream broadcast television content. It has a firm focus on promoting niche content to niche audiences, creating a new type of interactive web portal that brings together specialized content from around the world and delivers it to communities with similar interests. It is encouraging viewers to establish social links and trade opinions on what they watch.
Joost, which has raised $45 million from the likes of CBS and Viacom and forged partnerships with high-profile content providers and advertisers, offers traditional TV fare along with indie productions and social networking. It currently has more than 400 television series and 1,200 movie and short film titles across a number of genres, including animation, comedy, drama, music, and sports. On July 9th it announced that Japanese public broadcaster NHK will make a selection of its program offerings available on Joost.
While the P2PTV rivals officially launched some time ago (Joost launched in December 2006, Babelgum in early 2007) it is clear that both companies are still trying figure out what will trigger mass market take-up. Stay tuned to see which strategy is the biggest hit with viewers in the long run.
Veoh Launches Behavioral Targeting Technology
Excerpted from Online Media Daily Report by Mark Walsh
Leading P2PTV service Veoh Networks this week unveiled a new behavioral targeting system that lets marketers match video and display ads with specific audiences based on their viewing habits.
Still in beta, the technology draws on data collected on its users' video watching, searching, browsing, and other activities on Veoh.com to deliver targeted ads according to nine overall audience categories.
These interest-based segments encompass: action-minded; auto enthusiasts; digital youth; family-focused; information seekers; pop culturalists; socially conscious; sci-fi and anime fans; and upwardly mobile.
Within those broad groupings, marketers would be able to define a target audience even more narrowly depending on campaign goals.
"With more than a billion video views every quarter, Veoh is in the unique position to observe viewer behaviors and patterns across various forms and sources of content on an unprecedented scale," said Veoh CEO Steve Mitgang.
That means, for instance, if an advertiser wants to target tech and gaming fans, Veoh can deliver that audience both when they're watching related videos as well as other types of programming. Similarly, a marketer could focus on fans of a particular show by serving ads to that audience across various forms and lengths of content.
Veoh offers both professional and user-generated video, though more recently it has emphasized the former through syndication deals with the likes of Disney-ABC Networks, CBS, and Hulu, the NBC-Fox joint venture.
User-generated material, which sparked the online video boom, has proven a tougher sell to advertisers because of its uneven quality and more unpredictable content.
With its new targeting system, Veoh hopes to encourage advertisers to run campaigns that target the same audiences across both professional and user-contributed video. "Where behavioral targeting can play a very large role is in monetizing the long-tail of content," said Jarvis Mak, Director of Research and Insights at Media Contacts, the interactive agency of Havas Digital.
As video sites look for new ways to boost ad sales, he envisions behavioral targeting being more widespread in video advertising a year from now.
"Behavioral targeting is all about adding a layer to increase those CPMs, but could also be sold on a CPA (cost per action) basis," Mak said.
Behavioral targeting has generated growing controversy as the practice has become more prevalent in other types of web advertising. Last week, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing to consider whether new laws are required to protect web users' privacy.
A Veoh spokesperson said the company's targeting system is based on aggregate user data and involves no sharing of personally identifiable information (PII).
Veoh will charge a premium for behaviorally targeted campaigns. The technology will apply to a range of formats including pre- and post-roll ads, overlays, and standard display units.
The majority of Veoh advertisers have already begun testing the system, which so far has led to twice the click-through rate of standard ads. Brand advertisers on the site include Sony Pictures, Outback Steakhouse, TV Guide, Intel, and the Mini Cooper.
With a fresh infusion of $30 million in venture financing last month, Veoh has raised a total of $69.5 million to date from backers including Intel Capital, Adobe Systems, Shelter Capital, and Michael Eisner's Tornante Company.
Chinese P2PTV Service to Offer Olympic Coverage
Excerpted from Afterdawn Report by Rich Fiscus
NBC isn't the only company planning to offer online video from the Beijing Olympics later this summer.
PPLive, a Chinese company that provides streaming TV feeds using P2P technology, has inked a deal with China's state-run China Central Television (CCTV) to provide coverage of the event.
The video offered will be provided by CCTV.com, which is the official Internet broadcaster of the event in China. According to AC Nielsen ratings, PPLive streams video to 35 million people worldwide each month.
"We are very excited to partner with CCTV to broadcast the Beijing Olympic Games through our new Internet media platform. We are committed to delivering to our viewers the highest quality and most in-depth coverage of the sporting games that make up the Olympics," Bill Yao, Founder & CEO of PPLive said.
The streams will be encoded using the On2 Flix Engine to encode the video to On2 Technology's TrueMotion VP6 video codec, which will then be delivered via Adobe Flash on both the CCTV and PPLive websites.
"Our bandwidth costs are very high as we need to support a large number of concurrent downloads, and this will inevitably increase during the Olympics," said Shan Xiaolei, Director, Technology Management Commission, CCTV.
"On2 has helped us quickly address this problem by contributing the Flix Engines we need to publish our sports coverage in TrueMotion-based Flash video."
Eurovision Reaches Millions with Octoshape
As Europe settles down after an intensely followed Eurovision Song Contest, the impressive results from this year's webcast reveal record-breaking audience figures.
With viewers from more than 163 countries - many of which were not broadcasting the event - the TV-quality feed from peer-to-peer television (P2PTV) service Octoshape was a major hit.
The online ESC-TV platform has served more than 1.5 million sessions and more than 36 million minutes were consumed.
"Broadband penetration is on the rise everywhere, and streaming should no longer be considered a supplement to traditional broadcasts. In fact, for global broadcasts like these, it's really the other way around and using Octoshape we have a proven and viable solution for large scale, high quality, global webcasts." said Nicoletta Iacobacci of the EBU
Extending both the concepts of streaming and live broadcasting Octoshape and Eurovision took things to the next level - offering the events for on-demand viewing instantly after the live events had finished. This is possible because Octoshape now offers scheduled server-side recording with direct publishing to on-demand.
With features like instant on-demand and live event logs, a lot of users - even from countries that offered televised broadcasts - preferred the Internet as their source for their Eurovision fix!
Octoshape and Eurovision will be working closely together to offer future Eurovision events - such as the upcoming dance contest - through their joint media platform that has already reached millions of viewers with online content in high quality.
BitTorrent Made Easy with Speckly
Excerpted from Slyck.com Report by Thomas Mennecke
What has helped Google become the premier search engine? How did an Internet start-up transform itself from a noun to a verb? If someone asks you a question, how many times do you find yourself saying, "I don't know, Google it." If you're an Internet geek, chances are you've said this countless times. Google is an excellent resource because of its simplicity - no bells or whistles, just utilitarianism at its finest.
Transferring that simplicity to the file-sharing world hasn't gone so smoothly. BitTorrent has brought about a revolution in file sharing, yet those who aren't computer savvy enough still struggle to use indexing sites such as MiniNova or The Pirate Bay.
A new BitTorrent search engine dubbed Speckly aims to simplify file sharing to a mere point-and-click experience. At first look, the Speckly interface is rather rudimentary. All that's provided to the end-user is the logo and a search box. From there, the end user clicks "search" and before long is whisked away to the search results page.
Speckly searches all of the main BitTorrent indexers and trackers. MiniNova, The Pirate Bay, Isohunt, SeedPeer, Monova, FullDls, TorrentReactor, BT Junkie, LegitTorrents, and Vuze are all searched. While the end-user can't select what type of media he or she wishes to search for on the search page, this information can be isolated once the search has completed.
The goal of Speckly is to bring simplicity to the BitTorrent experience - something the developers felt was sorely lacking.
"Our mantra is (a) relevant, (b) familiar, and (c) simple," Ken from Speckly told Slyck. "It's too easy to provide a lot of BitTorrent specific information and lose many potential users. As a result, we tried to keep on search themes that people are familiar with."
Although things are kept simple on the surface, there's a significant amount of technology that runs quietly in the background.
"The site is run on a LAMP stack and developed using handcrafted HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript. No off-the-shelf libraries were used in order to keep the code as streamlined as possible. The intention is to have the server do as much of the work as possible rather than using scripts on the users' machines to do any of the sorting or formatting; this makes the site very responsive across searches. 'Flat files' (vs. databases) are used to keep track of search results yielding an architecture that can scale with minimal administration."
BitTorrent as a distribution medium can be best described as being on the cusp of mainstream acceptance. There are a few sticking points to full mainstream acceptance, however, as BitTorrent isn't as simplified as direct web-based downloading. The people behind Speckly believe this could change with just a bit of effort.
"We work in the Internet industry as well as probably spend most of our time online. We believe BitTorrent will play a significant role in the future of how content is delivered. What motivated us was the fact that BitTorrent remains on the cusp of general acceptance, but can't expand due to the high 'geek' factor. We've done surveys and found that people who would download files through BitTorrent won't because they just don't understand the lingo. Second, they didn't understand how you find BitTorrent files. As such, Speckly was born."
Speckly's mantra might be simplicity, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. Ken told Slyck that he and the Speckly team "are trying to stay focused on familiar search features including suggestions, hierarchy (grouping similar results together), previews (where possible), and generally improving the quality of search results so that finding the right result takes as few clicks as possible. All the while, we'll look to our users to guide the roadmap!"
Simplicity is something that's often times undervalued in exchange for a barrage of features and options. Although Speckly might not be suitable for the more advanced BitTorrent crowd, it offers enough basic features that can get any user, regardless of skill, started.
And if you're wondering where the word "Speckly" came from, Ken explained to Slyck, "P2P normally invokes an image of dots with lines connecting with each other. I can't remember who commented that it looked like a web that speckled, but it kinda took and we were calling it 'Speckly' thereafter. All a result of sleep deprivation and working on it late at night."
Fileai: Secure & Free P2P File Sharing
Excerpted from Killer Start-ups Report
Fileai is a free solution that allows users to securely share files that are too large to be shared by e-mail.
There is no limit on the size of files that can be shared and they are all encrypted for security purposes, and sent directly via P2P.
Since it's a P2P solution, you will need to leave your browser window open while running a Java Applet in order to connect to others and share files with them.
Once you've chosen the files that you'd like to share, you are given a Transfer ID which you can then share with anyone else in order for them to locate and download the files in question. Your files will never be stored on a server and you will only be able to send and receive when both parties are connected.
"Fileai.com is a free website that enables people to securely share files with one another that cannot be easily sent via e-mail. You don't need to download or install any software, and your files are not uploaded to any server. The files are encrypted and sent directly, P2P, through your existing web browser."
P2P is a widely used manner of sharing all sorts of files. While it is most famous for music and video downloads, it is also an ideal solution for the sharing of large documents and presentations as well. The fact that Fileai is completely free, and focused on private transfers could make this a popular solution.
Will people find P2P a convenient way of transferring private files or is it a more suitable solution for public sharing when many users can share parts of the same file and therefore it does not depend on both people being connected?
YouTorrent Relaunches as Download Search Index
Excerpted from Digital Media Wire Report by Mark Hefflinger
YouTorrent, formerly a popular search engine that indexed material on all of the most-popular BitTorrent sites, has after legal threats, relaunched as an index of solely entertainment industry sanctioned content, offering links to over 67,000 files or 6 terabytes of data.
The now-authorized site links to verified content offered on sites including Jamendo, Vuze, BitTorrent, Legaltorrents, Legittorrents, Gameupdates, Wortharchiving, BT.etree, and MiniNova.
MPAA Wins Copyright Infringement Lawsuits
Excerpted from The Heartland Institute Report by Nicholas Katers
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has won $4 million in damages from two websites found guilty of contributory copyright infringement.
MPAA sued CinemaTube.net and Ssupload.com for posting links to websites that distribute unlicensed copies of movies, television shows, and online videos.
The United States District Court of Los Angeles in its May 7th ruling ordered both websites to stop any further indexing that would violate the copyrights of MPAA members.
MPAA had similar success against indexing website TorrentSpy in the beginning of May 2008. The same district court found in favor of MPAA and assessed $111 million in damages against TorrentSpy. That figure was reached after Judge Florence-Marie Cooper required the site to pay $30,000 apiece for 3,699 proven infringements.
TorrentSpy shut down in March 2008 after failing to provide sufficient evidence against accusations of copyright violation.
MPAA efforts against websites such as CinemaTube and Ssupload mark a tactical shift by copyright holders against infringers. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and MPAA in recent years have moved away from targeting individual violators, instead going after intermediaries that index unauthorized downloads.
"The MPAA, like the RIAA, is playing a game of whack-a-mole," said Professor Michael Madison at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. Madison said MPAA and RIAA "will have some modest success in the short run, but it is difficult to see how this will add up to a comprehensive solution in the long run."
Alan Wexelblat, PhD, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), thinks such lawsuits do not carry the same weight in the digital world as they have in physical infringement cases.
"A policy of lawsuits and prosecution makes sense in a world of physical distribution," Wexelblat said. "It is quite sensible for MPAA to use the courts to fight against organizations that mass-produce copies of DVDs, but attempting to extend that approach to a fluid digital environment is a mistake."
Professor Matt Jackson at the Pennsylvania State University College of Communications offers a pragmatic explanation for contributory infringement lawsuits.
"Suing the middleman is a very effective strategy because the Internet service providers (ISPs) are the bottlenecks where enforcement is most effective," Jackson said. "It is much more efficient to go after a handful of ISPs than to try to sue thousands of end-users."
Wexelblat is one of many copyright experts who believe MPAA is doing more harm than good with its lawsuits. "I think these cases show that the MPAA will not respect any boundary in its aggressive pursuit of control," he explained. "Any target they can conceive of will be attacked."
Other experts in the field of copyright law feel MPAA has little to lose in the lawsuits.
"The MPAA comes off badly, but they are not losing friends they'd otherwise have had," said Professor James Grimmelmann at New York Law School. "They certainly don't come off anywhere near as badly as the RIAA does in its lawsuits against individual uploaders."
Grimmelmann highlighted MPAA's problems with "its campaign to get draconian laws against camcording movies in theaters" when discussing possible repercussions in public opinion.
The low daily visitor rates for websites such as Ssupload and CinemaTube have raised questions about the unintended publicity of these lawsuits for similar websites. Most published reports show the sites' combined daily traffic peaked at just 79,000 unique users prior to the lawsuit.
Some experts on copyright law, including Professor Michael Grynberg at the Oklahoma City University Law School, raise concerns about potential harm to useful websites. "Overaggressive IP enforcement may harm the public at large by stunting the evolution of these online products and services," he said.
One school of thought holds MPAA's efforts will be harmful for all participants except MPAA itself.
Professor Michael Carrier at the Rutgers University School of Law said, "The law being created by the MPAA and courts is expanding to punish activity that has increasingly less relation to the infringing activity." Carrier added, "While it might be good for the MPAA, it tends to be harmful for parties using technology in innovative ways."
Grimmelmann believes the fault lies with the products offered by MPAA and comparable organizations.
"The MPAA needs to treat its customers as fans again and be more aggressive in offering them such easy access to movies that they're not tempted by comparatively inconvenient unauthorized downloads," Grimmelmann said. "Even if the law still supports it, an ownership mentality doesn't get you very far these days."
Jackson, a proponent of end-user lawsuits, thinks MPAA will eventually move to sue individual violators.
"The MPAA should go after the end-users instead of the middlemen, even though this is less efficient from the copyright owners' perspective," Jackson said.
"This imposes costs on society, but that cost is the price we should be willing to pay for free speech."
Clouds and Pirates: Darknets Rising
Excerpted from Media 3.0 Report by Shelly Palmer
"Kung Fu Panda" is doing a great job for Paramount this summer. As of today, the movie has grossed $196,680,294. It is still playing on 3,347 screens nationwide and after five weeks in release it is still number five behind "Get Smart," "Wanted," "Wall-E," and "Hancock." So imagine how surprised I was to receive an e-mail from a casual acquaintance yesterday offering me a link to an HD copy of the film.
"Kung Fu Panda" won't be released on home video for months, so not only was this guaranteed to be an unlicensed copy, it was guaranteed to be either a bad video bootleg made with someone's HD camcorder in the theater, or a very good copy of an unauthorized file - the file was pristine.
Now, this is not an unusual type of e-mail to receive and it is not a new phenomenon. There are literally hundreds of P2P networks out there with copies of every movie ever made for the taking. What gave me pause was that this particular file was not on a P2P network, it was sitting on a private, subscription-based storage cloud.
Other than the legal issues, there is really no risk to downloading this file. Nobody knows what I'm downloading. A few years ago, you would call this type of private network a "darknet."
But that's not exactly what this is. This is more like the type of service-layer, Internet-based, storage cloud you'd use to back-up your hard drive, send large business files, or move large disk images around.
And, because it is private and from a trusted source, the file won't be a spoof or infect my computer with a virus.
This may seem like a subtle change from a legal point of view. It probably is. But, from my perspective, the ramifications are paradigm shifting.
Think about this - you have a bunch of pretty big movie and TV show files on your hard drive that you bought from iTunes or ripped from DVD. You really need the local hard disk space back so subscribe to a service like RapidShare or MegaUpload. You back up the files to the cloud. So far, so good.
A week or so later, you're online chatting with friends and someone says something about some episode of a show or movie you have stored.
Being the very friendly type of person you are, you send them a link to the file. After all, it's not that different from lending them a physical CD or DVD, right?
At the end of the day, P2P networks and strange or alien files are not going to cause any more economic hardship for the content industry than they are causing right now. However, good natured, good citizens using private storage clouds are going to be hugely hurtful.
And, if good citizens can cause irreparable harm by paving the road to hell, imagine what bad natured, bad citizens will be able to accomplish with the same technology. Trust me, the computer network does not know the nature of its users.
Just for fun, I sojourned to a few storage cloud sites and got an up-close, personal view of the issue. Here's some hands-on knowledge.
YouSendIt is a seemingly harmless service that now offers an Outlook plug-in that will automatically use a storage cloud to send oversized files.
The free service is file-size limited; you can pay for big uploads if you need to. YouSendIt says that businesses will like their service because of the value-add of trackability. They might. People will like it because the business is paying for it and they can send monster files everywhere through Outlook.
Sure private "light-nets" enable businesses to move large files easily, but the darknet side is a safe haven for infringers and file sharers of all sorts.
A simple Google search for "Coldplay sendspace" will round up numerous results for full album .zips of their latest and back catalog.
With sites like RapidShare and MediaFire, file sharers don't need P2P networks or BitTorrent networks or bandwidth. All that is needed to upload and share a file is a standard compression tool (stuffit, winzip) and Internet access.
Once uploaded, the file is searchable from all over the Internet and can be shared with anyone. Or, you can simply make it available to your private darknet.
Some sites have delay periods for non-members, but waiting 90 seconds won't deter anyone who is trying to get access to a specific file. Also, sites like SendSpace and RapidShare only allow a certain number of downloads per file (100 for YouSendIt), while others, like ZShare and MediaFire, keep a file active as long as it has been downloaded in the past six months.
Many sites offer premium membership packages, but they aren't really necessary, unless you're sharing a lot of GBs. For free, anyone can download applications, albums, and movies - it's as simple as highlighting a file on your screen.
If you're interested in seeing all of this for yourself, here's a short list of sites to visit. Oh, and don't forget to visit Yahoo Groups and Google Groups. Pretty much anywhere that tech companies offer free storage, you'll find a bunch of people sharing files: Drop.io, MailBigFile, MediaFire, MegaUpload, Pando, RapidShare, SendSpace, YouSendIt, and ZShare.
There are many, many more. Some of these companies were funded by selling their investors on the idea that this type of file transfer could be ad-supported. It is not a sustainable model. According to Yaron Samid, the founder of Pando, the bandwidth and storage costs add up too quickly and the sites must restrict file sizes or charge for their services.
Everyone I know is starting to use cloud storage for back-ups as well as the normal doing of business. In a very short period of time, this technology is going to become so easy-to-use and commonplace that the law of unintended consequences may innocently take the movie business to the place where the music business has gone to die.
I've looked at clouds from both sides now. Want your mind blown, check out Apple's MobileMe, which launched this week. Then you'll realize, you really don't know clouds at all.
Wuala Opens Beta for P2P Storage Service
Excerpted from PC Pro Report by Matthew Sparkes
The online storage service, Wuala, has announced that it will be opening a public beta on August 14th, with a sneak preview already available on the company's website.
The service uses P2P technology alongside encryption to provide distributed online storage for users. Each Wuala user stores a small portion of other users' data, giving permanent access to all users from any computer.
Versions of the client software are available for PC, Mac, and Linux.
"We're thrilled to announce that we will launch the public beta on August 14th," said Dominik Grolimund, CEO of Wuala. "After almost four years of development and about ten months in closed alpha, we're ready to open it up to everyone."
By visiting the site, users can take a look at how the new service works, and also sign-up in advance for the open beta test. The company has been running a limited alpha test since September 2007, with users already sharing over a million files using the system.
Coming Events of Interest
P2P MEDIA SUMMIT SV - August 4th in San Jose, CA. The first-ever P2P MEDIA SUMMIT in Silicon Valley. Featuring keynotes from industry-leading P2P and social network operators; tracks on policy, technology and marketing; panel discussions covering content distribution and solutions development; valuable workshops; networking opportunities; and more.
Building Blocks 2008 - August 5th-7th in San Jose, CA. The premier event for transforming entertainment, consumer electronics, social media & web application technologies & the global communications network: TV, cable, telco, consumer electronics, mobile, broadband, search, games and the digital home. The DCIA will conduct a P2P session.
International Broadcasting Convention - September 11th-16th 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. Uniquely, the key executives and committees who control the convention are drawn from the industry, bringing with them experience and expertise in all aspects.
Streaming Media West - September 23rd-25th in San Jose, CA. The only show that covers both the business of online video and the technology of P2PTV, streaming, downloading, webcasting, Internet TV, IPTV, and mobile video. Covering both corporate and consumer business, technology, and content issues in the enterprise, advertising, media and entertainment, broadcast, and education markets. The DCIA will conduct a P2P session.
P2P MEDIA SUMMIT LV - January 7th in Las Vegas, NV. This is the DCIA's must-attend event for everyone interested in monetizing content using P2P and related technologies. Keynotes, panels, and workshops on the latest breakthroughs. This DCIA flagship event is a Conference within CES - the Consumer Electronics Show.
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