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Friday, September 19, 2008

P2P-Next

[via EETimes]
A consortium of European broadcasters, academia and technology companies is hoping to turn P2P on its head to create a next generation P2P content delivery platform, by connecting millions of TV sets at home. By bringing the P2P technology to living-room TV, this newly proposed P2P platform will let a consumer broadcast a live stream -- whether his own content or TV channel -- to millions of Internet users….

[T]he proposed P2P content delivery signals would allow anyone to become a "broadcaster" [which] is the premise for the next-generation content delivery platform envisioned by the European Union-funded P2P-Next research project. The consortium members include BBC, European Broadcasting Union, IRT (Munich-based Broadcast Technology Institute), Technical university of Delft and technology companies such Pioneer and STMicroelectronics….

ISPs [have been] reluctant to make huge the investment in IP routers and adding more servers at the edge of the network [to facilitate the transmission of live events to millions simultaneously, and similar desired functions]. [According to the consortium, t]he answer to such challenges is in "redistribution of the data stream between peers " without [using] a central server but connecting millions of TV sets," said Stuart. It can offer "a scalable and robust solution -- almost at zero cost," he added. More specifically, the group plans to improve the bandwidth efficiency, "by expanding the proven BitTorrent protocol," said Stuart. "You can stream to one, two, or thousands of people using roughly the same amount of bandwidth."

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