PBS | I, Cringely . March 2, 2006 - Peering into the Future

This is a good article with good ideas about how to resolve the issue of how to distribute legitimate media through the internet such as TV, music, Movies, and other copyrighted media.

There is also mention of a company called "Peer Impact" which has a different and IMHO better way of distributing media. Details are in the article, but it got me to thinking a little about the TV watching experience. When Desperate Housewives comes on there is almost this shared experience going on, because you know that millions of viewers are watching it at the same time you are (depending on the timezone of course).When you have to download a show, you loose that to some degree. What I mean is, people may not be watching it at the same time because either their download didn't start at the same time as others, or for whatever reason. A sporting event is probably the best example. IT is happening in real-time, and there is no way to fast-forward it or anything. You can pause it and continue, but since it is live, you can't do much more. This brings up the question of how do you distribute sporting events. People want it real-time. They don't want to wait for it to get fully distributed in a peer network before watching it.The best way to handle this kind of thing is to simply multicast. Multicast is beautiful because no matter how many people are watching the stream, the bandwidth required for it remains the same. It is a 1 to many approach, versus the traditional 1 to 1 delivery of several copies of each piece of media to each connection. So as I was saying, this should and does work perfectly for real-time stuff.Here's where stuff gets really special though . . . Without knowing a lot about how the distribution system works with Peer Impact, might I make a free suggestion in that regard? In any P2P network, there needs to be a critical mass of people sharing the content to handle the number of viewers who want to watch it. To get that content out to the peers, traditionally, the system relies on one peer passing its data on to others. So to get a TV show ready to become available on the network may take some time to get cached on all of the necessary clients for distribution. A better approach is to multicast the cached content to all of the clients. This way all the clients are receiving the content they need to cache up at the same time.Now here's an even better idea. Take the same "Peer Impact" P2P idea, and make it into an appliance. That would be the best of all scenarios. The client now has the ability to access their favorite shows as normal, using this appliance, but instead of paying their traditional cable bill, they simply pay per-episode. Now, since their client has been running now all day, servicing content requests, it Peer Impact has been crediting the viewer with cash. The viewer now has the ability to put that cash toward whatever he/she wants to watch, and all from the TV, not the computer.I think the last idea is the best. I haven't been able to find anything on their site about how they distribute their cached content, so they could, in all reality be doing just that already.

Read more at www.pbs.org/cringely/pu...