Many people who watched live streaming video of the inauguration of U.S. President Barack Obama on Jan. 20 may not realize that their PC was used to send the video to other PCs, too.
Clicking "yes" to a CNN.com dialog box installed a peer-to-peer (P2P) application that uses your Internet bandwidth rather than CNN's to send live video to other viewers.
The P2P application is called Octoshape Grid Delivery and is managed by Octoshape ApS, a company based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
And guess what! It really works, as long as the site is supported and the supported site dosen't re-write their flash player code from scratch!
As for the question the Brian Livingston asked "But if all TV programs are going to be streamed live by media giants, as I'm sure will eventually happen, the question is what impact this will have on Internet bandwidth — and who will pay for it."
The answer is pretty straight:
Who pays? Of course, the user pays!
What about bandwidth? With evolving technologies, I'm sure one day Gigibit Ethernet will be as common as Megabit Ethernet is now.
Would like to hear other peoples thought on this though!
Terrabit..... gigaflop .... speeds? IMO we are falling behind. What happened to the days of talk about the "cube" optical Hard Drive? Remember this talk a few years ago? Seems as tho "progress" has been slow in the tech world the past 5 or so years.
On topic... there should be some way to disable the uploading of your bandwidth. Doesnt affect users like myself now, but what about the ppl that have to pay for bandwidth... will cnn cut the users a nice fat check for using others bandwidth..... a future dilemma for the consumer/tech community
