Cookin' With P2P: Recipe for Success or Flash in the Pan?

McQuivey says that it is precisely this cost/delivery promise that is attracting content owners to P2P. "Part of what you’re seeing with mainstream media becoming friendlier with P2P is that they are recognizing that if they are ever going to get to the Holy Grail of digital media, which is high-definition video, then they are going to have to find a more efficient way to transport video across a typical network connection." McQuivey adds that buying a whole bunch of servers to stream media to half a million people at any given moment is a costly proposition, whereas distributing across a network the way peer-to-peer infrastructure does is a better way to go.

One company banking on that idea is Azureus, an open-content publishing platform and delivery service. Azureus CEO Gilles BianRosa says his company is building a P2P network precisely to deliver high-definition video content, and he believes this efficiency will allow him to grow his company without incurring the cost of building or using a CDN. "We are incurring less than twenty percent of cost compared to hosting and distributing content centrally," BianRosa claims. "We can have an open platform and not charge publishers for posting. We are not literally bleeding money on bandwidth costs every month, because it’s not our bandwidth," BianRosa says.

As you might expect, content delivery networks don’t see it that way. Akamai Technologies Inc. CTO Mike Afergan says that while he sees P2P as an interesting technology, if it were so simple to deliver content reliably in this fashion, his company would be doing it. "If P2P were such a slam-dunk argument, we would have implemented it five years ago. We are not [staying away from] P2P for some religious reason, but in practice, it’s just a lot easier said than done." Afergan adds, "An interesting data point on P2P is how long the technology has been around and, frankly, how little traction it’s gotten over time. I think that speaks to the business challenges of ensuring that you have the right business controls and logic to actually deliver content and enable the customer’s business applications the way they want," he says.

[While Akamai hasn’t exactly done an about-face on P2P, since this article was written the company did acquire Red Swoosh and its P2P network and desktop download client. Akamai CEO Paul Sagan told Streaming Media that while the company won’t be introducing any new product offerings at this time, Akamai would "benefit from from acquiring Red Swoosh's skilled software developers that have years of advanced expertise in P2P technologies."—Ed.]

The Content Security Challenge
While content owners might like the idea of potential lower cost and content delivery efficiency, in reality, there is still a real fear about the ability to secure content on a P2P network and make sure it does not get distributed illegally on the open internet. For some, this means applying digital rights management (DRM) to control access to the content, but the question stands, does DRM control content theft to expand your market, or does it scare consumers away and limit your market? The answer depends on whom you ask.

Forrester’s McQuivey sees DRM as a market inhibitor, but one that media companies are willing to endure. "Many media companies are asking me, ‘How do we make consumers understand why we need DRM?’ My answer is, ‘You don’t and you never will.’ When you choose to pursue a DRM strategy, which they all do, you essentially are going to have to accept that you are going to slow down your own development in the market," McQuivey says.

At Starz Media, DeBeviose says that DRM is an absolute requirement and he can’t imagine putting content on the P2P networks without it. At the same time, he recognizes that using P2P to distribute content legally could help stem piracy. "Our view is you can never track every pirate on the web. It’s just impossible. The key is to provide a legitimate model to those users who are out there looking for content," he says.

Jim Erricson, VP of marketing at Move Networks, whose clients include ABC, says most of his clients wouldn’t move forward without DRM. "From a legal-entity perspective, they are very protective of their content, and [because of] the fact that we are acting as extension of what they doing, DRM was required," he says.