The problem with anything that stays around long enough to get its hands on European Union money, is that it is usually out of date before the technology comes anywhere near to market. That is certainly a danger for the P2P-Next a conglomerate of 21 industrial partners which is getting a €14 million ($21 million) grant to identify P2P uses and technology in Europe.
The partners, include the UK’s BBC, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, the European Broadcasting Union, Lancaster University in the UK, German production company Markenfilm, Pioneer and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. As part of the research they aim to develop a Europe-wide ‘next-generation’ internet television distribution system.
The project will work with both PCs and set top boxes and allow the building of communities around favorite content. They will also be tested to see if it could be used for major broadcasting events.
‘We will have an open approach towards sharing results. All core software technology will be available as open source, enabling new business models. P2P-Next will also address a number of outstanding challenges related to content delivery over the internet, including technical, legal, regulatory, security, business and commercial issues,’ the group said in a statement.
The BBC is perhaps the most influential member of this group, having already built traffic of half a million customers a day for its iPlayer software which gives access to the past week’s TV over the internet and claims that it has downloaded 17 million full length TV shows in the past two months.
But it has taken the iPlayer 4 years to come to fruition, and it has only just got off the launch pad and yet there are still likely to be issues both political and among ISPs which are carrying much of the P2P traffic.
We have already seen that in the US ISPs are randomly reducing unpaid P2P traffic to prevent their systems becoming clogged with content that may be illegal, and that the FCC there, while not being supportive, has agreed that as long as it is done for the wider good of the remaining ISP customers then it is allowable. We also have to contend with private TV broadcasters crying foul when their budgets for researching P2P is limited, and they find they have to compete with a government funded organization like the BBC. The iPlayer has just overtaken both online efforts from ITV and Channel 4 in the UK because the BBC has had more money to promote its service.
Separately the gradual distribution of nodes by traditional content delivery networks like Akamai, along with radical improvements in codec technology such as that by Broadcast International using the IBM Cell chip, which promises HD streaming over the internet in under 3 Mbps, may mean that in the end P2P technologies lose something of their edge. If ISPs begin allowing uncapped downloads, but capped uploads, they would immediately put a stop to using the uplink on a broadband account quite so freely.
Finally, although P2P is useful for sending the same content to a large number of people, it is considerably more difficult to offer VoD streaming on the same way and none of the leading P2P services like Joost or Babelgum have yet fully cracked this.