Update: Tuesday, Oct 3, 2006

IMSC's Zimmermann on Video on the Net Panel

The question "Is Video Peer to Peer a Money Making Option?" was recently pondered by Prof. Roger Zimmermann and three other panelists during a roundtable discussion at the Video on the Net conference. The successful inaugural event of Video on the Net was held at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC) from September 12 through 14.

The purpose of the forum was to examine the effects of the broadband Internet on the movie, TV and broadcast industries. Organized by pulvermedia, the conference was established as part of the Fall 2006 VON conference. VON, originally short for Voice on the Net, is a forum that is held bi-annually during spring and fall in the United States, as well as annually in Europe, Mexico and other locales. Initiated by legendary Internet pioneer Jeff Pulver in 1996, the VON conference (then called "The Talking Net") helped to define and shape a new industry over the last decade during which VoIP (Voice over IP) has evolved from an obscure technical acronym to a household word. Video on the Net was a logical extension of VON as video distribution over the Internet has taken off during the last few years.

The other participants on the panel included Bram Cohen, CEO and co-founder of BitTorrent, Michael Weiss, CEO of StreamCast Networks, and moderator Patrick Norton, executive producer of Ziff Davis Media.

Noting that video over the Internet is a disruptive technology for the movie, TV and broadcast industries, the panel agreed that network bandwidth is one of the key issues going forward. Compute power and storage are now affordable, even for large video distribution sites. Bandwidth, however, is still expensive. As an example Weiss mentioned the popular YouTube site and its nearly $1 million monthly network bill. While YouTube has some deep-pocketed partners, smaller businesses may have a difficult time to break even in such an environment. The fundamental concept of peer-to-peer algorithms, which utilize the aggregate bandwidth of users in a network, has the potential to change this equation and remove the bandwidth bottleneck from central sites.

One of the key questions is how to monetize video on the Internet, as the free sharing of copyrighted material has been struck down by the courts. While popular movies and TV shows can demand a high enough per-download price for a sustainable business model, more specialized videos may need to be offered at a lower cost. It was the consensus of the panel that "The Long Tail" of less popular videos can only be distributed cost-effectively with a peer-to-peer model, which has legitimate uses beyond the recent crop of file-sharing networks. To further lower the cost charged to customers, on-line advertising can be a significant source of revenue.

All of the participants have a background in media and p2p technologies. Bram Cohen is the designer of the popular BitTorrent protocol and Streamcast Networks is the originator of the Morpheus network. Zimmermann has worked on video streaming for more than a decade, designing some of the fundamental algorithms of media distribution architectures. The Yima media server developed at IMSC became the foundation of the pioneering Remote Media Immersion (RMI) system. RMI, a breakthrough in Internet technology, demonstrated high resolution, big-screen digital video streaming and multichannel audio at a time when broadband was still in its infancy.

Recently Zimmermann has focused on peer-to-peer large-scale group communications. For example, his team designed the ACTIVE protocol that combines advantages of a centralized approach with the decentralized nature of a p2p topology. It is specifically designed for live media streaming, something that he expects to become much more prevalent on the Net in the future.

Maintained by Roger Zimmermann
Last updated: Tuesday October 3, 2006.
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