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Delving into the Commercial P2P World

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sat Mar 04, 2006 12:42 PM
from the isp's-take-a-while-to-figure-anything-out dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "PBS has an interesting look at the emerging commercialized P2P networks brought to light by Cringely. With the news of Sky's default bundling of commercial P2P applications in its broadband software, many users seemed to be against the idea of getting nothing from providing Sky with their upstream bandwidth for free. Meanwhile, PeerImpact, seems to be rewarding users for their P2P system through PeerCash, and GridNetworks is building an system called PeerReward."

Related Stories

[+] Cringely on P2P vs Streaming Data Centers 179 comments
Anonymous Coward writes "Robert X Cringely is postulating today that as bandwidth applications grow, the data centers will never be ready to serve 30 million concurrent streams of data. Akamai, with its tens of thousands of servers spread in an intelligent topology, still can't serve more than 150,000 concurrent streams, which is never going to impress the TV network exec used to audiences in the millions. Cringely choruses that secure P2P is the solution to delivering not only high quality video but also to audiences that scale in the millions. BitTorrent seems to have worn out it's welcome with the MPAA recently, so maybe the future holds P2P networks owned and managed by Hollywood?"
[+] Your Rights Online: Broadband Service as P2P Distro Experiment 71 comments
Not another doctor wrote to mention a PC Doctor article about the Sky by Broadband service. In addition to providing access to the internet, the service also helpfully downloads and installs the Kontiki P2P service. From the article: "What this really means is that Sky in all their advertising are making out that you are downloading content directly from them rather than other users. Also, the P2P link continues to run in the background after you've shut down the main application, eating up bandwidth by allowing others to download the files from your PC. Kontiki also collects and sends back to Sky a lot of information about your PC. There is no mention as to how this data is protected from unauthorized access, however, initial examination with Ethereal seems to show that all data is at least encrypted during transmission."
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  • Not a bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    Commecial P2P to me never made sense, I was supposed to pay for the song then give my bandwidth so others could pay someone else for the same song. At least they are trying, and now I know if I share there is something I am getting back.
  • Steam? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 04 2006, @01:02PM (#14850470)
    Is Valve's Steam P2P? I recall hearing that they hired the guy that developed Bittorrent.
    • Re:Steam? by slavemowgli (Score:3) Saturday March 04 2006, @03:18PM
      • Re:Steam? by Firehed (Score:2) Saturday March 04 2006, @03:25PM
        • Re:Steam? by lachlan76 (Score:2) Sunday March 05 2006, @12:59AM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • Cash, Reward, Save (Score:5, Insightful)

    by saskboy (600063) on Saturday March 04 2006, @01:08PM (#14850493)
    (http://www.misscellania.com/ | Last Journal: Monday October 29, @11:47PM)
    When I see anything "bundled" with the words Cash, Reward, or Save, the little SCAM bells go off in my head.
  • by throwaway18 (521472) on Saturday March 04 2006, @01:24PM (#14850536)
    (Last Journal: Sunday May 21 2006, @04:58PM)
    Metamachine, the company that made edonkey, tried a system called transmission films. They put films on the ed2k network (edonkey, emule, shareazza) in windows media format with DRM. The idea was that people would pay to watch the films.
    They had a few classic horror films and other stuff.

    It appears to have been a complete failure. They took the link to transmission films off the edonkey homepage in early 2005 and the site has been down every time I'v looked since then. I tried downloading one of the films a few years ago when the site was still up to see how it worked. It took about two months because nobody was resharing the DRMed files.

    It seems to me that if commercial p2p downloads don't work on the ed2k network with several million users and a link from the edonkey homepage then the idea that individuals could make any money by uploading or recommending content is laughable.

    People using p2p networks simply do not want to pay.
  • Peer Impact = Doomed (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Dietrich (16248) on Saturday March 04 2006, @01:24PM (#14850538)
    Well, it looks as though Peer Impact is a bust. It is chock full of people trying to make money with hardly anyone using it to discover or buy new games/music/videos/software. This seems like a classic example of a really good idea that is very well implemented but can't reach critical mass.

    If only they had the money to advertise heavily they'd have a shot. Also, it might help if they were more low-key about all the "Earn money!" stuff because while that brings evangelistic eyeballs it doesn't make for a community of anything more than rabid, greedy Amway-types who bitch about being poor.

    They've been around for awhile now and they have a slick web forum application integration, but their forums aren't active at all beside noise like "how much money have you made?". Shame really.

    To have a downloadable app that people crave you have to give people something for free. Giving the impression that a primary draw is to earn free money while half-way marketing it as an "iDownloads"-type store... not gonna work.

    Hehe, it's amusing that they named their link promotion scheme "Noisemaker" links.
  • P2P Communication (Score:1)

    by beasstman (462291) on Saturday March 04 2006, @01:57PM (#14850614)
    Several communications systems that are commercial are using P2P underneath now too. Of course Skype is (at least hybrid) P2P, and there has been lots of (early) work lately in the IETF and related groups on P2P SIP http://www.p2psip.org/ [p2psip.org]. Several companies are building on this technology for commercial purposes, incuding the one I work for, SIPeerior Technologies http://www.sipeerior.com/ [sipeerior.com].

    It seems that people are finally taking P2P seriously as a commercial technology, which is good. Now it remains to be seen if commercial companies will keep calling it P2P. The word, at least to me, seems like it might end up like the term "hacker". *WE* all know that it means something positive (or in the case of P2P, is a neutral technology term), but the press has negative impressions, largely from file sharing in this case. I often wonder as this stuff grows in popularity if the term will become more acceptable, or an alternate term will evolve from the marketing folks.
  • Commercial P2P is like... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bbzzdd (769894) on Saturday March 04 2006, @01:58PM (#14850626)

    ...buying a new car with the caveat you have to drive Stan, the guy at the service desk, to work every other Thursday.

  • p2p, capacity etc. (Score:4, Informative)

    by br00tus (528477) on Saturday March 04 2006, @02:00PM (#14850631)
    Cringely talks about the capacity to broadcast Desperate Housewives over the Internet, and how much bandwidth that would take. Having worked in Internet-related companies for a decade, the first thought that comes to my mind is Mbone [savetz.com] - does anyone remember that? It was a technology set up to save capacity on broadcast, but from what I recall, your Cisco routers would have to allow its multicasting. And when this was requested of ISPs they would balk, saying we don't want that much broadcast over our pipes. Which of course is ironic, because people could broadcast over their pipes anyway, Mbone just existed to save them bandwidth when people did so. Anyhow, Mbone realistically died out long ago, anyone interested in this can do research into its failure to catch on. It failed due to political reasons instead of technical ones, the brighter lights of networking of the day were working on its specs.

    Then of course, there's that many people have broadband lines to their home where they can pull down more than they can push up. I can upload about 4-5KB a second and still be able to browse the web, send e-mail etc. without a problem. Meanwhile, I can download at about 90KB a second. So if all my p2p transfers on say Bittorrent after the first one were tit-for-tat, I could only download at 4-5KB a second. This situation is similar for most other broadband users. Anyhow, Bittorrent already includes technology where you tend to share more with people sharing with you. With the advent of Bittorrent I stopped using the ed2k network, but many of those clients have a similar concept. And Gnutella has this with partial file sharing as well, although people mostly use Gnutella for small files. But getting back to the currently important one, Bittorrent, as I said, the applications usually have this anyhow. If that's not enough, some trackers and Bittorrent websites do counts of which of their members are good and bad in an attempt to deal with people who still manage to leech.

    One mistake Cringely makes is assuming if I'm downloading, say a video of Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz debating Israel, that someone else at my ISP will be wanting or sharing this same video. Sometimes I'm downloading files where only one person is sharing them and I download it all from them. If its several (often with people from Brazil, Australia, Germany etc.), still what are the odds one of the people sharing this file on this protocol will be from my ISP?

    A lot of this could have been solved long ago with Mbone. But the ISPs didn't want it.

  • by peterfa (941523) on Saturday March 04 2006, @03:08PM (#14850796)
    What you do is this:
    1. Buy any popular CD with a major label on it.
    2. Rip a song.
    3. Release it via P2P.
    4. Tell the company you're fucking telling the RIAA unless they give you a whoping "STFU" check.
  • money (Score:1)

    by wwmedia (950346) on Saturday March 04 2006, @05:00PM (#14851139)
    (http://www.footballfans.tv/)
    trust me there are goos ways of making money, and alot of it!
    from filesharing

    i was recently involved in making a rapidshare.de style system

    the money earned from adverts covers the cost of dozens if servers and makes a nice profit
  • by Surur (694693) on Saturday March 04 2006, @08:34PM (#14851895)
    (Last Journal: Sunday August 14 2005, @06:13AM)
    ...and its pretty cool. For one, its an extra service they provide to their existing satellite TV subscribers, but at no extra cost. Something like that is almost unheard of, so I'm quite impressed. Sure it uses some of my upstream bandwidth, but if this makes it so much cheaper for Sky that they can do it without charging me a fee for movies without any adverts at all then I'm more than happy to oblige. It even works when you are off-like, so you could potentially download a few movies onto your laptop and take it for a flight.

    This is definitely not a case of something for nothing, and I'm more than happy to participate. In fact, I would say this is how it should be done right. Use P2P to reduce your distribution costs, and pass that saving on to the customer. Reducing distribution costs is especially important when content is offered for free, and its interesting to note that BBC is also looking into a similar P2P system to help distribute archive video material.

    Surur
  • Grid Netorks better pony up a large licencing fee to Peer Impact if they want to offer a incentive scheme seeing that Peer Impact's parent company holds this patent .

    "Abstract of WO2005038617
    Methods and computer systems for increasing the revenue stream from a work made available in digital form are provided. The methods and systems of the invention are particularly useful for musical, video, interactive game files, and artistic or commercial works that can be digitally copied and transferred or distributed, such as via the Internet. Embodiments of the present invention advantageously can form part of a greater system that provides access to digital forms of numerous works or groups of works, such as those that are copyrighted, to thereby extend the revenue-producing capabilities for the copyright holder of digital or digitized works to bona fide purchasers of those works. In turn, bona fide purchasers of a work who later provide copies of that work or other authorized works, or provide transfer or distribution bandwidth with respect to that work or other authorized works may receive incentives. Advantageously, no central warehouse of digital content is necessary with the present methods, and users may introduce authorized content into the present system in a controlled manner, through peer-to-peer systems, while realizing economic incentives for doing so. The present systems and methods also provide a myriad of embodiments of incentive and apportioning payment schedules, configurations and properties."
    http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=WO20 05038617&F=0 [espacenet.com]
  • by kclittle (625128) on Saturday March 04 2006, @01:57PM (#14850622)
    You didn't take your meds this morning, did you, Percy?

    [ Parent ]
  • this is why iMesh and the still vaporware Mashboxx are doomed they offer no incentive to the end user even though they are commercial p2p .
    [ Parent ]
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