PPLive: P2P Meets YouTube
Remember Shanghai-based P2P start-up PPLive we covered back in May? The P2P video platform has followed an increasingly victorious route and now is about to turn the concept of a P2P-powered YouTube into fact. This follows the experiment PPLive is currently conducting involving a P2P accelerator for Flash video streams, application called PPVA and which basically distributes the stream of any popular Flash video from sites such as YouTube using P2P requiring no participation of the hosting server. Google didn’t take part in the project and normally they should play offended.
How it works
Currently supporting only Windows, the application is designed as a small plug-in to be discreetly placed in your task bar and “awaken” the moment it senses a Flash video stream. Afterwards PPVA investigates whether the respective clip has been accessed and cached by other PPVA users and if indeed they have then a requestment of some of the data will be sent to them. There’s also a small status window indicating the source of the data for each clip together with a bunch of other info.
The success of the whole thing depends on the popularity of that video. When accessing one of YouTube’s most in demand videos only the first few bytes are needed (read: requested) from the server. From here on, P2P distribution starts doing its job and that number gets in a short time to 100 percent.
As NewTeeVee observe this application could have a serious effect on the business of content providing:
Of course, some content providers might be uneasy about not being asked whether they want their videos distributed via P2P. This becomes an even bigger issue when advertisers start requesting more detailed statistics about online video usage. PPLive told us that every video gets an initial request from the hosting server, which should allow video hosters to keep a tally of requests and viewers. But Google is reportedly moving towards a more detailed statistical analysis that looks at which parts of a video are being watched and which are skipped. PPVA could seriously distort these statistics.
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