1,000,000 Gigabytes Delivered
From Yahoo! Finance
By Peter Svensson, AP Technology Writer
Full Article on Yahoo! Finance
The technology best known for pirating movies, music and software online is increasingly being adopted by businesses as a cheap way to get video content to customers.
A number of startups are embracing so-called peer-to-peer technology and have convinced some big-name media companies to use them to deliver legal content.
"In 2005 when we met with content owners, 'peer-to-peer' was a dirty word," said Robert Levitan, chief executive of file-sharing company Pando Networks Inc. "In 2007, finally, content owners came and said 'Yeah, we think there's a role for P2P.'" Levitan was speaking Friday at the first "P2P Market Conference" of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, a trade group with more than 100 members.
Pando is prime example of mainstream acceptance: It's providing the means for NBC to provide DVD-quality downloads of its shows, including "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno.
The P2P programs used by Pando and Verisign are quite different from BitTorrent and eDonkey. They don't let consumers distribute their own content. What comes down the pipe is strictly from the media companies that contract with the P2P companies. The consumers may not even know they're using P2P software -- all they know is that they've installed video player software on the computer.
So far, Internet service providers have been left out of the equation even though they're saddled with the burden of conveying all the extra traffic. Some of them have partially blocked or slowed down P2P traffic to keep it from swamping their networks.
But the adversarial relationship is changing: At the conference, Verizon Communications Inc. presented results of a test that showed that by sharing information on its network with Pando so it could optimize downloads, the companies were able to speed downloads and reduce Verizon's cost of carrying the traffic.
However, not all Internet service providers are likely to get on board with that solution. It may work well for phone companies, but cable companies have a different structure to their networks, and it may not address their concerns.
