Researchers Suggest P2P As Solution To Video Domination of The Internet

JPawlak writes "NewScientistTech reports that big businesses may be realizing the benefits of P2P technologies. Blizzard uses it to distribute patches for World of Warcraft, and now researchers at Microsoft are indicating internet users may have to use it to help distribute online video clips. The growing cost associated with delivering such content may be becoming prohibitive for some companies. 'The team also suggest a way to prevent Internet Service Providers' costs jumping when their users start uploading much more data. The trick is to allow sharing only between people with the same provider, when data transactions are free. That restriction would cut the pool of sharers into smaller groups, meaning MSN's servers would have to do more to fill any gaps in the service. But costs could still fall by more than half, simulations showed.'"

Comments

Re:The idea is great, but...

[Osty]

Oh and I forgot to ask this as well: how do you get around firewalls/NAT? Most people these days are behind NAT. In my experience, UPnP only works out-of-the-box on very few systems because most routers have UPnP disabled by default.

Support linux-igd? The project started back up in the past year and a half or so, along with libupnp coming back from the dead after Intel abandoned it. Help these projects get to the point where they're trivial to setup, stable, and shipped with all distributions and you solve the problem for the large number of folks using linux NATs. Better yet, that will ultimately trickly down to the router market as well, since a fair number of those use (or have used in the past) linux-based firmware. I've been using linuxigd for 2.5 years now and it's worked great with only a few minor hiccups (Xbox, Xbox 360, Azureus, Messenger, etc all work well with it), but in the past it's been a real pain to setup and actually get working.

Once people can finally get over GRC's sensationalist crap from nearly six years ago, we might finally get a real solution in place for NAT users. We all know IPv6 won't ever be widely adopted enough to make NAT obsolete.

Re:P2P != BitTorrent

[Chandon Seldon]

My favorite P2P protocal is the Internet Protocal. If ISPs are going to block P2P, they should start with that one. All the other ones rely on it anyway.