What Do You Prefer: P2P Networking or Video Streaming?

After launching the question File Hosting Services Vs. BitTorent: Which One Will Rule File Sharing?, we invite you now to consider another one – Are video streaming sites becoming more attractive than P2P file sharing sites?

P2P Networking or Video Streaming?

A recent report made public this week and conducted jointly by the University of Michigan, the nonprofit research corporation Merit Network, and the Internet-traffic-monitoring company Arbor Networks shows that while P2P traffic is dramatically decreasing, streaming and direct downloading services are gaining considerable ground.

While Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor Networks says he can’t name the exact cause of the P2P (peer-to-peer) traffic decline (from 4 percent of all traffic on the Web to about half a percent), he suggests that the reason for the increasing success of video streaming sites like Hulu (10 percent of all Web traffic) may owe to the consumers’ need and demand for more convenient ways to get media, whether movies, TV shows or other (p2p networks are presenting too much trouble for many people):

"It's far more convenient and faster. It used to be the case that to watch a movie, you had to wait eight hours for your peer-to-peer to seed. And now you can go to one of these sites and watch a movie in real time in [high definition] via streaming."

There are, however, others who claim that P2P file sharing is not going anywhere, it’s just that…it’s a bit slower when it comes to increasing rates. For more information about this fact check out the P2PON post about the current popularity rate of P2P networking vs. the file hosting services like RapidShare that have been seen a great increase in popularity lately.

In making the report, data from more than 100 ISPs in 17 countries was gathered.

(source: www.technologyreview.com)