After many years of reluctance, major content owners
finally appear to have embraced the Internet. There
are now several legal download services available on
the Internet, but downloading incurs a delay for the
user. Streaming reduces this delay, but creating a
scalable interactive Video-on-Demand streaming
service is neither trivial nor cheap, creating high
barriers to entry.
In this book, we address the problem of designing and
implementing a scalable system for Internet based
interactive multimedia streaming, and present the
Streaming P2P Protocol (SPP) architecture, a system
for low-cost interactive Video-on-Demand services.
Using a combination of content distribution networks
and Peer-to-Peer networking techniques, the SPP
architecture achieves the benefits of a content
distribution network without the costs being carried
by a single entity. Fully deployed, the
infrastructure of the SPP architecture is not owned
by a single entity but a result of actions beneficial
for all parties. Content providers can distribute
content at low cost, users have greater access to
more content, and network owners can control and
reduce traffic.
