Solid State to Launch Hybrid BitTorrent Video Streaming Service
Solid State, a digital media delivery company has developed an advanced streaming technology based on the BitTorrent protocol. The company presented their peer-assisted streaming technology at the DEMOfall 2006 conference in San Diego. Technologies like this could save popular streaming websites like YouTube or Google Video a lot of money. It is estimated that YouTube [...]
Solid State, a digital media delivery company has developed an advanced streaming technology based on the BitTorrent protocol. The company presented their peer-assisted streaming technology at the DEMOfall 2006 conference in San Diego.
Technologies like this could save popular streaming websites like YouTube or Google Video a lot of money. It is estimated that YouTube uses 45 terabytes of storage, requiring several million dollars worth of bandwidth a month to stream the content. Peer to peer streaming would significantly decrease the costs for YouTube, because most of the bandwidth would come from peers instead of YouTube’s own servers.
Solid State announced:
Solid State Networks is a developer of high-performance, content-delivery solutions, and the first commercial-class software suite based on the massively scalable BitTorrent protocol. Our flagship product, the Solid State Distributed Delivery Network, is a hybrid content-delivery solution that combines the economic and performance advantages of peer-assisted technology with the reliability of a traditional CDN. It now includes support for on-demand streaming of content.
Although Solid State can implement some of the features of BitTorrent, they have to make some concessions. A key feature of the BitTorrent protocol is that the pieces of the file are not delivered in a “chronological” order, to make it possible to give a high priority to rare pieces. This doesn’t seem to suit streaming.
In August we reported that the “social” BitTorrent client Tribler has plans to integrate YouTube videos in their client. Johan Pouwelse of the Tribler project told TorrentFreak that they are planning to index every one of the +6 million videos posted on YouTube.
A prototype of the YouTube indexing function from Tribler will be ready by the end of this year, and includes an Amazon like recommendation system, and video tagging features.
