YouTube

source site: P2P is coming to YouTube

It looks like the idea of a P2P-powered YouTube is finally becoming reality, albeit without any contribution from Google. Singapore Shanghai-based P2P start-up PPLive, which we previously covered for its hugely successful P2P video platform, is experimenting with a P2P accelerator for Flash video streams. The application, which is dubbed PPVA, essentially distributes the stream of any popular Flash video from sites like YouTube via P2P without any involvement of the hosting server.

It would seem that the future of online content distribution could be via P2P. Online content business such as PPLive in china is already doing massive amounts of content distribution through P2P – and very profitably. I’ll let the article explain the success of PPLive.

source site: PPLive: Huge, Profitable, and Barely Known

PPLive has so many seriously stunning numbers, it’s hard to choose which one to lead with. But I think 5 million concurrent live streamers might be it.

Let me back up. PPLive is sort of the Joost of China, in that its product is a peer-to-peer software client that delivers Internet television (both live and on-demand). But in part because few Chinese people have cable subscriptions, it already has 100 million installations and 20 million active users, who spend an average of 11 hours per week.

A good investment proposition!

Internet ventures have long been a phenomena that is very difficult to understand. On one hand, the internet or the web has been wildly successful that there is a wealth of information (and disinformation) at the click of a mouse button.

Yet, on the other hand there have only been very few successful businesses. The successful ones are the likes of Google, Yahoo etc, but very few others.

So what drives venture capital funds to the web?

The dotcom bust in the early 2000s brought things back to reality. Yet, now we see the second wave of the web… called web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is primarily used to describe the second wave of web ventures which draw primarily from the internet community itself. Sites like mySpace and YouTube are the recent prime examples of community based sites achieving wild success (at least in terms of eyeballs).

The question now for the likes of YouTube – is this sustainable? What do you think? Is the free-for-user-and-hope-to-get-advertising-revenue model workable?

Tag: YouTube

P2P coming to YouTube – content delivery by P2P

YouTube and the dilemma of its business model