Are Joost's Problems in Expanded Beta Proving P2P Not Ready for Primetime?

Author: Michael Wolf, Practice Director, Digital Home

Wed, 9 May 2007 13:21:47 EDT

When Verisign bought Kontiki, and later Akamai purchased Red Swoosh, it looked like P2P had become a truly legitimate technology for wide-scale rich media distribution. This is also what Bittorrent wants us to believe as they embark on their Bittorrent DNA program to push their P2P technology as a digital distribution alternative to the traditional CDN distributed caching approach.

And when Joost was still in early beta, there were hardly any complaints about the performance and companies like Viacom were gushing about Joost. However, since the company went into a wider beta, there have been some pretty widespread reports of performance issues, including my own. That started me to wonder if we're seeing the limitations of P2P in action. While Joost is not 100% P2P powered, as they have indicated they will use some servers/CDN infrastructure, they do rely on P2P in large part for content distribution. And the fact that much of their content is pretty long-tail (meaning its not exactly what most of us are hankering to watch), the chances there will be someone in close proximity to me (or in other word, a PEER in P2P) to act as a source is pretty low. There are also severe limitations in upstream bandwidth for many of us, including my own $55 a month Comcast subscription (I think it caps out at 256 Kbps upstream), meaning if I can find a peer to serve a particular title to me (or even a few sources), I will at that point be competing for some of that bandwidth from the source side of things, and there might not be a whole lot to go around.

P2P showed it works for long-form video downloading, but it hasn't shown that, in practice, it works well outside of an integrated network for content streaming on the scale that Joost is trying to do it. If they do succeed, it could very well change things. But at this point, their success is by no means guaranteed.

To submit instant feedback, you need to be logged in. Registration is free and takes just a few minutes. For existing users, please login here. To register, please click here.