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Has there ever been a business with significant commercial success that designed a peer to peer architecture to serve as the foundation of it's technology or IP

Has there ever been a business with significant commercial success that designed a peer to peer architecture to serve as the foundation of it's technology or IP? I can only think of one, that being Skype. Of course that doesn't mean Peer5 can't do it, and I sincerely hope they do because I always root for entrepreneurs. However there seems to be this weird disconnect between p2p architectures and profitable companies, even though the theory is so powerful. I can only guess as to why: - The illegal stuff has somehow unfairly tarnished public opinion - It's too low level and is only suitable for standards like WebRTC where lots of people buy in at once to provide enough momentum - It's not easy to do right

mwseibel 10y ago
In terms of usage - Skype, Bit Torrent, and Bitcoin come to mind (last two aren't commercially successful yet...)
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  No reason you can't be the second one. Good luck to you and the team.
pquerna 10y ago
I used to work at Joost. Culturally, it came fro the Skype world, and I worked on the p2p engine used for both on-demand and live streaming of video: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost The cost of delivering content is not zero. The main variables are the codecs & quality of a stream, which on average is going up, and the cost to deliver (bandwidth/storage). The cost deliver keeps going down. So, there are periods of time, when a p2p approach "looks" nice. 4k? Maybe all this live-streaming stuff? Sure. But what happens is the cost of delivery with HTTP keeps going down. Joost had a bunch of other issues that made it fail, un-related to the use of p2p. p2p might be cheaper to operate for a business, but it has almost no advantages for users over a well built CDN. For users it only has negative attributes (baring a few situations on LANs / getting streams into places you can't put a CDN).
- whadar 10y ago
  Prices do go down, but consumption goes up in a faster pace. So overall companies pay more for CDNs for video :) The thing is, even if CDNs would be free, they have limited capacity and they saturate during large live events. That's one of the reasons we still watch sports on pay-tv.
  - WhitneyLand 10y ago
    >Prices do go down, but consumption goes up in a faster pace Not true. It varies based on what's in vogue on the content side, quality requirements, and the state of technology at a given moment in time. As one point of reference, Flickr posted an analysis here recently that discussed how their architecture has evolved over time based on variable ratios of usage requirements and hardware costs.
    - shacharz 10y ago
      I can't speak to Flickr's use-case specifically, but generally speaking the content delivery market is growing.

mwseibel 10y ago

In terms of usage - Skype, Bit Torrent, and Bitcoin come to mind (last two aren't commercially successful yet...)

WhitneyLand 10y ago
No reason you can't be the second one. Good luck to you and the team.

pquerna 10y ago

I used to work at Joost. Culturally, it came fro the Skype world, and I worked on the p2p engine used for both on-demand and live streaming of video: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joost The cost of delivering content is not zero. The main variables are the codecs & quality of a stream, which on average is going up, and the cost to deliver (bandwidth/storage). The cost deliver keeps going down. So, there are periods of time, when a p2p approach "looks" nice. 4k? Maybe all this live-streaming stuff? Sure. But what happens is the cost of delivery with HTTP keeps going down. Joost had a bunch of other issues that made it fail, un-related to the use of p2p. p2p might be cheaper to operate for a business, but it has almost no advantages for users over a well built CDN. For users it only has negative attributes (baring a few situations on LANs / getting streams into places you can't put a CDN).

whadar 10y ago
Prices do go down, but consumption goes up in a faster pace. So overall companies pay more for CDNs for video :) The thing is, even if CDNs would be free, they have limited capacity and they saturate during large live events. That's one of the reasons we still watch sports on pay-tv.
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  >Prices do go down, but consumption goes up in a faster pace Not true. It varies based on what's in vogue on the content side, quality requirements, and the state of technology at a given moment in time. As one point of reference, Flickr posted an analysis here recently that discussed how their architecture has evolved over time based on variable ratios of usage requirements and hardware costs.
  - shacharz 10y ago
    I can't speak to Flickr's use-case specifically, but generally speaking the content delivery market is growing.