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The Venice Project: From bitTorrents to Distributed Streaming

October 25, 2006 02:23 PM

Topics: Skype Partner Watch | Skype杂志 | Technology | conferencing | ebay | events | skype | skypejournal | voip

In the file sharing world of Kazaa and bittorrents, members of a network share two things: the files, and offers/bids for those files. More specifically, they ask for or offer little chunks of files ignoring the chunks' order in the file. You pass along what chunks you have and grab the chunks you need and, eventually, getting little bits from many sources, you have all the parts you need to assemble a copy of the whole file.

But what do you do with a live event, like a news broadcast or a university lecture? How do you get the benefits of scale-free p2p distribution while keeping all the viewers in sync? How do you accommodate people tuning in and tuning out during the event?

Skype conference calling goes part way. It distributes little bits to/from the conferenced people in streamed order. To keep a conversation rolling it will tolerate dropped chunks and accommodate resource challenges like poor CPU power.

The Company That Will Soon Be Formerly Known As The Venice Project promises to extend this to sharing your bits with strangers. Like bittorrent, you're giving the network a little control over distribution of the bits. You shouldn't mind sharing a little upstream bandwidth with the community since you're sipping from the same stream. Part of their art will be a balance of:

  1. Centrally managing the publishing and initiation of streams (think YouTube),
  2. Peer to peer distribution of those streams (like bittorrent, but first-bits-first), and
  3. Playing on a rich client (like Skype).

At the application layer, the network forms users into groups depending on the channels they are watching. Great for targeting advertising. Can the same kind of behavior inform the network layer for optimizing p2p topology?

The closest existing technology to The Venice Project I can find is made by Network Foundation Technologies (NFT). Al Bredenberg posted an interview with NFT CEO Marcus Morton in March 2006. He describes just this architecture, already well deployed. The p2p distribution recently saved one client 78% bandwidth costs. It delivered a five-fold improvement in scale. In their supernode-free design, each node rebroadcasts to 0 to 2 people.

I talked with Marcus yesterday, just back from the Distributed Computing Industry Association's P2P Media Summit at Digital Hollywood. He said The Venice Project is doing for his business what eBay's Skype purchase did for VoIM: instant credibility. But where TVP is a direct consumer play, NFT white labels infrastructure for content partners (like the Simple Green U.S. Handball Open) and content distribution partners. Where TVP will layer their clients with social media and community publishing, NFT leaves that to their partners.

I hope to meet Marcus face to face next week at Streaming Media West in San Jose, California.

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Posted by: Phoneranger at October 25, 2006 3:16 PM

Don't forget the other players in the P2P Streaming space. qqlive, pplive, zattoo, MySee, Mediazone, TVU, Roxbeam/Coolstreaming, TVKOO, UUsee, RawFlow, Vidoo and of course www.gridfold.com. I think Gridfold is the best but then I'm biased.

Posted by: JpZero&One at October 25, 2006 10:37 PM

With this company NFT, and what the Skype/Venice guys are promising, sounds like we are finally going to get real "TV" over the internet! Its about time!

Posted by: scottjay at October 26, 2006 8:39 AM

Skype Journal, That first comment by "PhoneRanger" should be deleted. It is obviously spam for the Chinese company Gridfold. Why do I say that?
It is pretty simple as all the systems of these companies mentioned by this spammer are just filler so he can promote his company at the end of his post.

Let me explain the above mentioned fall into two categories; number 1 the Chinese (which steal bandwidth by using "unrestricted supernodes", take your bandwidth when you are not watching, and do not respect copywrite). Obviously these Chinese solutions will be blocked by both IT professionals for the "unrestricted supernode" approach and bandwidth stealing, and will be fought by broadcasters/content owners because they steal copy written material. And stealing is what they are built to do.

And number 2, the others like Rawflow and Zatoo which do not have a working product for video (the majority have no product at all and are little more than a website). For example RawFlow are only doing AUDIO, and if you follow the current links on their site (as of this posting) one of their quote un quote "partners" links takes you to the "partner" CDN site where you can only find information about the company Phil originally wrote about NFT. As a second example PhoneRanger mentioned Zatto which has only ever been a website and a press release. In May they posted (New York and San Francisco, May 24, 2006) on their site claiming they were going to stream the World Cup. Did they stream the World Cup (I think we would have heard about that)? Has their site even been updated since then? The answer is "no" on both.

So back to the point, Phil is correct in that NFT is the only company out their with a working, copywrite respecting, "non supernode", non bandwidth stealing, solution........ that is until The Venice project is unveiled (and I can not wait for that). Enjoy

Posted by: Jeff Kastner at October 26, 2006 12:12 PM

This is Jeff Kastner, producer of the Simple Green U.S. Open of Handball production. Recently, a number of my video projects have involved getting the sport of handball more visible in the media, and I have to say the NFT has been a HUGE blessing. This was our fouth live streaming event this year (second with NFT) and the savings over unicast streaming are enormous, not to mention getting a really cool video player! And the customer service from NFT and CDN partner, StreamGuys, has been first-rate.

For the U.S. Open, we had a $30k filming budget and I was able to hire a great crew and use the best HD cameras for a TV production. But we knew there are handball fans all over the world, with a big population in Ireland and we wen't going to reach them with conventional TV, and especially not live TV...unless it was on the web. We ended up having viewers on almost every continent, all watching the event live, as it happened in Orange County.

Prettty amazing technology! Remember NFT...you'll be hearing a lot more from them in the future.


Jeff Kastner

Posted by: TheMysticFive at October 26, 2006 3:23 PM

I checked every one of the phone rang sites, and most were Chinese sites.

Posted by: chris at November 28, 2006 7:57 PM

There is another service that does P2P streaming as well - Peer Impact. www.peerimpact.com They do streaming using TV shows and movies such as Firefly and V for Vendetta.

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