BBC Could Adopt P2P Live Streaming

Yesterday CNet posted a QA interview worth reading with the BBC's Head of Digital Media Technology Anthony Rose which had as topic the plans the company has with iPlayer. Rose said that the main focus will be now placed on personalization, socialization, and customization of iPlayer.He detailed some aspects concerning the aggregate bandwidth use of the iPlayer and revealed how many users access the service using their mobile phones. The peak of the interview was reached when P2P came into discussion:

Why did you abandon P2P downloads?

Rose: I think the Internet world has changed in about the three years between our making a decision to use P2P and now. The P2P proposition was made in the day a long, long time ago, when distribution costs were really, really high, and it was felt that our servers wouldn't be able to cope with the load of a lot of people downloading.

But in the end, what's happened is that streaming is clearly the main proposition, and download is about 10 percent of the total consumption. So if the downloads came directly from our servers, it would add only a small extra on to the streaming piece, and in fact it made it more effective–essentially more cost-effective–to simply have a direct HTTP download of the download files, rather than maintaining the infrastructure for a separate P2P delivery network.

[...]P2P did work very well for us, but times change and our saying we're not using P2P now doesn't mean we will never want to use it again. We may find, for instance, that we use multicast for live video or a live P2P in the future. The one thing that's constant in the tech world is that things change, and as of today, direct download makes the most sense for us. But things may change in the future.

BBC originally employed Kontiki's P2P technology when creating iPlayer but it abandoned it when the web version became focal point at the end 2008. The company, however, has also been working with the P2P Next project aiming at a feasible open source P2P streaming alternative.