P2P Still Lags for Video Distribution

Written by Ryan Lawler

Friday, September 26. 2008 at 02:30 PM EDT Post a comment

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Peer-to-peer (P2P) may no longer be a dirty word among content distributors, but executives at Streaming Media West say it still has a long way to go before it's considered a go-to technology for video distribution.

"Peer-to-peer has gotten a bad rap along the way, but it's just a different way of approaching things," says Doug Pasko, senior technologist at Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ). "It's a useful tool. It's not the be-all, end-all. It's not a silver bullet. But it definitely has a prominent role to play in the online video market."

But so far, P2P technology companies have had a difficult time getting traction in the media space. While companies like Kontiki and Pando Networks Inc. have managed to grab some commercial video distribution deals, the vast majority of video on the Internet is delivered by progressive downloaded or streamed Flash files.

Part of that could be attributed to P2P's long-standing association with copyright infringement. While that issue has dogged P2P for years, BitTorrent Inc. CTO Eric Klinker says it's no longer as relevant as it once was.

"Copyright infringement is not inherently a technical problem," Klinker says. "That represents more of a social problem."

Another challenge has been P2P's reputation for not being friendly to ISP networks, or even to other applications being run over broadband connections in the home. That's changing with the P4P working group and the Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) initiative underway in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) .

"As we've seen in the P4P working group, we've proven out that things can be changed for the better. They can be a lot more efficient and be a lot higher performance for the end user," Pasko says.

Despite the fact that many of the early hurdles have been worked out, the technology has yet to take off as a platform for streaming video delivery.

"Peer-to-peer has proven itself as a valuable technology in the download space, but in the live and streaming space, there's probably better options today," says Barry Tishgart, vice president of Internet services at Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK).

That could be due to a problem in the business model. The key value proposition many P2P firms sell on is the ability to lower the cost of delivering content to the end user. But with aggressive price cuts driving down CDN costs throughout the industry, execs say it's no longer enough just to offer a service that's cheap.

"The key value proposition that the P2P industry has brought forward is cost mitigation. Yet you see around you that content delivery costs are coming down, and there are so many different options out there. Cost and efficiency tend to be a benefit, but there's got to be more than that," Tishgart says.

Pasko says that with P2P distribution, there needs to be a balance between price and quality. "Keeping aim at the cheapest price is not necessarily what the content distributors want. They want it to be reasonably priced, but it has to be high quality," he says.