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Delving into the Commercial P2P World
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."
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.
Is Valve's Steam P2P? I recall hearing that they hired the guy that developed Bittorrent.
When I see anything "bundled" with the words Cash, Reward, or Save, the little SCAM bells go off in my head.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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.
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.
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/. Several companies are building on this technology for commercial purposes, incuding the one I work for, SIPeerior Technologies http://www.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.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
...buying a new car with the caveat you have to drive Stan, the guy at the service desk, to work every other Thursday.
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.
The difference is that slashdot has professional paid editors who put in the time and effort to correct grammar and spelling mistakes, and edit the story for clarity and accuracy. In addition, they studiously check that the story has been already posted so dupes are removed.
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
...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
Information is the location of things. Computation is moving things around.
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 .
0 05038617&F=0
"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=WO2
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 .
The content itself is the incentive -- what incentive do wikipedia authors have, to create and edit those million articles on a daily basis ?
p roduct-screenshots/
You should checkout Krawler[x] - http://www.krawlerx.com/download.htm (windows build)
It lets users author and share original courses, books, even novels -- over the p2p networks. Think wikibooks + authoring tool + p2p. The authoring tool itself is mega-amazing -- one can tailor individual access rules/content access workflow for individual users -- like noone should see this page beyond this date or whatever...screenshots: http://krawler.wordpress.com/2006/03/04/krawlerx-
Remember -- calling anything commericial does not make it auto-popular -- its the people who make stuff popular. I think the correct title should be "popular p2p apps.." -- rather than "commercial whatever..."