P2P filtering now a mature business

This report has details of a comparative survey of P2P filtering systems (for those ISPs intent on the shaping/evading "arms race" with P2P developers). There are no technical details to speak of, but it certainly seems to be an area with many players, presumably some demand, and effective products.

Adobe Media Player launched

Adobe Media Player has been launched. It is yet another application to download and view video files, but appears to come with all the frills you'd expect (especially DVR / podcast functionality), considerable partner content to get things going, and DRM / advertising / viewership-tracking to appeal to content owners intent on turning a buck.

BBC's iPlayer popularity leads to sour relations with ISPs

British ISPs and the BBC have been making rather heated comments following the realisation that the Beeb's popular iPlayer P2P player provides a service at the expense of increased throughput on the ISPs' networks.

The BBC News site has more on this.

See also: BBC wants to build its own CDN

The business of the video-streaming business

MSNBC / BusinessWeek have a fairly interesting review of the business and businesses (but not the technology) of video-streaming on the Net. There's no news there, and the introduction is very basic, but they do give an idea of what (some) big businesses are doing on the internet TV front.

Comcast now shaping all internet traffic

Researchers at the University of Colorado have posted evidence that US ISP Comcast is shaping all internet traffic (web browsing included) by forging TCP reset packets. This may well be their promised "more protocol-neutral" shaping, following the outcry over recent BitTorrent-specific shaping.

PeerApp provides ISPs with P2P caching systems

The Jerusalem Post has a very non-tech article on PeerApp, an Israeli company which provides ISPs with systems to cache popular files for P2P downloads inside their networks. The company's website has a few more details; apparently, they sell systems to ISPs, which cache locally the files P2P programs request, and then redistribute them to subsequent requesting peers. Their products support a number of popular P2P file-sharing protocols, and intervene "transparently" (so they say) in application-level communications.

Binkx launches P2P VOD player

Blinkx have launched bbtv, a P2P-based video-on-demand player. Blinkx are (were?) primarily a video-search company, with speech-to-text technology and capabilities to search inside video by text. Their new video player is supposed to build on that by letting the user connect video content with relevant web content. TechCrunch talked to their CEO.

last100 sums up Internet TV in 2007

last100 has a summary of the main Internet TV stories they carried in 2007.

Comcast will play nice with BitTorrent

Comcast and BitTorrent have announced some sort of collaboration, after Comcast has come under heavy fire for actively disrupting BitTorrent traffic. Comcast will continue to shape traffic, but apparently without singling out particular applications' traffic. BitTorrent will strive to be friendlier to ISPs' networks and their costs. The announcement is already making waves, both pro and con.

P2P streaming media from Velocix

Velocix, formerly CacheLogic, a British CDN, now offers video streaming services (both live and on-demand). Velocix services are provided by a hybrid CDN-P2P network; their P2P protocol is apparently based on BitTorrent.

March Madness live broadcast on Joost not a resounding success

Apparently , Joost's live broadcast of the March Madness basketball games ran into technical difficulties. The "regular" (?) streaming from CBS's site worked well.

Fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control

ZDNet has up a mildly technical note/article/review on fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control.

Internet TV subscriptions doubled in 2007

Internet TV subscriptions more than doubled in 2007, according to this report, to 12.3 million. France, China, and the US lead the adoption of Internet TV.

CBC to share show on BitTorrent

Canadian public television will distribute a very popular annual show, worldwide, DRM-free, via BitTorrent. News.com has some details and some P2P-evangelism on the topic.

Joost Network Architecture

Courtesy of Lev K.'s web-browsing, here is Joost's own high-level, eminently readable description of the Joost Network Architecture, and some of their corporate concerns arising from it. A clear and interesting presentation from last year's UK Network Operators' Forum.

Tribler to offer live TV through P2P?

Uri A. points out a blog post on Mininova announcing a closed beta test for new video streaming in BitTorrent-based Tribler. Details are somewhat on the light side, but a quick search of the Tribler site leads to some specifics for users.

BBC wants to build its own CDN

The Register reports that the BBC plans to bolster its iPlayer internet TV service with a network of distribution servers located inside British ISPs, creating a Content Distribution Network over Internet infrastructure (rather than over proprietary cable). This follows their earlier effort at P2P distribution of their content, and offers a different approach to decreasing their internet traffic costs, and making the service less of a burden for ISPs.

Joost goes live

In line with previous hints and rumours, Joost will start streaming live channels (rather than the VOD they do now), initially just to cover March Madness, and presumably to try out their systems.

Cisco will distribute GridNetworks' P2P TV client

Cisco has invested in GridNetworks, makers of the GridCasting hybrid CDN/P2P TV network, and will distribute their client in (millions of) their home networking devices, definitely an interesting connection.

The GridCasting client is freely downloadable, and I could watch some demo material, but couldn't actually find content providers who use it to distribute their media.

P2P + ISP = P4P

Verizon will work to speed up (some kinds of) P2P traffic, while saving money on that same traffic, according to several reports recently. Verizon is part of the P4P Working Group of ISPs and P2P makers, aimed at creating a technology with advantages for both ISPs and P2P users; apparently they are quite excited by recent results by researchers at Yale. The main goal appears to be to maximise P2P communications within the ISP's network, saving on the much greater costs of inter-ISP communications.

There's some high-level verbiage on P4P publicly available already, and Pando (recently mentioned as working with NBC for their P2P TV offering) are evidently involved.