BitTorrent offers 'peer accelerated' content delivery

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 10 October 2007 11:10

Your IT - Home IT

BitTorrent is commercialising its peer to peer network by offering a delivery service to other companies.

The strong point of P2P networks is that they allow the rapid delivery of large files to multiple users by effectively making each computer downloading the material act as a server as well.

BitTorrent Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA) is aimed at content publishers that want to achieve smoother and faster delivery, especially of video files.

According to company officials, BitTorrent DNA can be easily overlaid on existing content delivery networks and servers, balancing the use of P2P and these resources to meet quality of service targets. Up to 80 percent of content delivery can be shifted to the P2P network.

"Implementing BitTorrent DNA on top of legacy infrastructure has the profound impact of allowing our customers to deliver a better user experience, higher quality video, faster software downloads, all with the security and reliability of a managed service," said Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent.

Client companies are charged per gigabyte delivered by the network. This is an interesting arrangement, as it is the users that pay for the bandwidth needed for distribution. Perhaps they will benefit from lower prices from content providers than would have been necessary to support traditional distribution mechanisms.

The first customer to use the service is Internet TV operator Brightcove. The company has a number of big-name partners, including British Sky Broadcasting, CBS, Discovery, Fox, MTV, Sony BMG and Warner Music.

Brightcove's Show service, which uses BitTorrent DNA, is currently being piloted, with general availability planned for 2008.

"Internet TV started with short videos on websites, but the next step is to move seamlessly from contextual video into full-screen, full-length programming," said Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove chairman and CEO.

"BitTorrent DNA addresses fundamental technology challenges associated with high-quality media delivery online, and by integrating it into a new offering in our Internet TV service, we can give our content publishers the option to easily deliver full-screen, broadcast-quality streaming video to their viewers."

This arrangement echoes Joost's model, which uses a P2P network backed by a few servers to deliver on-demand video streams to users.

"We already have the broadcast infrastructure in place that effectively multiplies the scale of the existing Internet to handle the next wave of content distribution," added Navin.