Brightcove is the first user of a new kind of BitTorrent, which to our way of thinking is unlikely to do any more than cut Content Delivery Network (CDN) costs in two. Essentially what it is doing is allowing any content organization, to seed a managed P2P network, with the CDN of its choice and share the workload.
This is pretty much what is happening when the BBC and AOL uses Verisign’s Kontiki P2P delivery, and somewhat like the system offered by Joost and Babelgum to deliver live TV services. One company we follow, Rawflow, offers a very similar controlled P2P delivery of TV quality streamed video files, and says that it cuts CDN costs by around 50%, less if it is a VoD application.
Brightcove already has a CDN based set up, complete with upload and management utilities, built around Adobe Flash video, and the new system called Brightcove Show is simply an option to deliver video using the new BitTorrent client called BitTorrent DNA (Delivery Network Accelerator). Each customer will need a BitTorrent P2P client, which we imagine can be embedded (disguised) in a download manager or player, and then it can be used to delivery either streams or files.
What is not widely understood is that it is far easier when delivering streams to offer a broadcasting schedule. The one stream is sent from the CDN, and then it is forwarded a fraction of a second later using the upload bandwidth of the first user, sent to multiple other users. However BitTorrent in its literature is talking about this being video delivered in a stream from a web site. In this situation it would require copies of files to live on other machines in the closed user group, in order to create multiple, parallel downloads to deliver the file.
Delivering video streams on demand from a web site would also require that copies of the streamed file were out on the broader internet among users of the service.
“In the last two years, Internet TV has transformed the Web by bringing the storytelling power of video directly into sites, but contextual and viral video clips are only the beginning,” said Jeremy Allaire, chairman and chief executive officer of Brightcove. “Now the industry is ready for the next major leap in the evolution of Internet TV, and that’s gracefully extending from short video clips on sites into full-length programs and movies delivered via the Internet to PCs.”
Well we agree with him there, but there is more than one way to skin a cat, and at IBC last month Akamai talked about entirely re-jigging its network, moving content files into cache out closer to the edge of the network, in order to facilitate much the same effect.
Brightcove says it will be using BitTorrent DNA, with Limelight as the content delivery network, but BitTorrent makes it clear that the DNA technology can work with any CDN that a customer wants.
Brightcove Show is available now through a beta program of selected customer and will go on general availability in 2008.
BitTorrent DNA can offer Quality of Service for video delivery and can manage video, software or game delivery, by calculating whether each block of content is best delivered from the P2P network or the CDN. Reporting tools are provided, and it is managed as a secure, private delivery network for any one publisher’s content.