Peer assisted content delivery has been around well over a decade but is only now coming of age for video distribution in the streaming era, because of its potential to improve core bandwidth efficiency by up to 10 times. This can help negotiate peaks in demand during major live events and also allow streaming services to be deployed over bandwidth-constrained networks, such as 3G or even 4G cellular infrastructures, as well over aging DSL or cable services. Until recently, online video has mostly been delivered via the traditional client/server architecture on a one-to-one unicast basis where clients download content from dedicated servers managed centrally, often via a CDN and then onto an access network operated by an ISP, either a…