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Delving into the Commercial P2P World

Posted by ryuzaki0 on 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."

1 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. commercial p2p is a commercial failure by throwaway18 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.