Wolf Richter

The European Union has awarded a grant of 14 million Euro to a consortium of companies and research institutes gathered around the University of Delft (Netherlands) to develop a “next generation” P2P network. According to the press release the goal of the project is to create a new media delivery mechanism using the emerging P2P paradigm and explore its potential use for Internet Television. The new system builds on the decentralized Open Source file-sharing software Tribler.

The project is ambitious in several aspects: First, quality of service in decentralized P2P systems is notoriously difficult to manage, which has so far reduced the commercial value of this technology for streaming rich content like e.g. a TV signal. Still, the area is highly competitive with several projects like Joost or China’s PPlive innovating in the market for years with mixed success. One major challenge outside the control of any innovator is the asymmetric design of the dominant DSL lines, which provide fast down-streaming, but have limited capacity for up-streaming, which throttles down any decentralized architecture.

Second, the team will have to come up with a smart answer for copyright management in their “next generation” P2P network to avoid headlines like “European tax payers money used to build next generation Pirate Bay”. Both Pirate Bay and the next generation P2P solution are based on BitTorrent technology, which has so far been successful to resist against effective enforcement of copyright law. The “next generation” P2P solution will be more decentralized than conventional P2P tools like Kazaa or eMule and hence be even harder to control. But with a budget totalling almost 20 million Euro, the team has a lot of pocket money to spend to address these challenges.