There's a new content delivery network courting ISPs, specializing in lowering the bandwidth consumed by P2P traffic as well as delivering legal movies and music.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 10, 2006]

On Monday, Cambridge, UK-based P2P caching company CacheLogic announced that it has built a network that will help P2P become acceptable to both ISPs and content owners. It also announced a partnership with the most popular P2P software, Bit Torrent, to include CacheLogic code in future Bit Torrent builds.

The company points out that P2P is already very popular with end users. It says that the number of P2P users is growing rapidly, and that the files that P2P users share are growing in size. Whereas in the past, most P2P traffic must music, today many files are video. The company reports that globally, over 50 percent of all file are over 1 GB in size, and over 2.5 GB in size in Asia, which has the world's fastest residential networks. Today, the company says, more than 60 percent of P2P traffic is video files.

Everybody wins, says Andrew Parker, CTO and co-founder of CacheLogic. "The content provider wants a lower cost of delivery, the ISP was to reduce traffic overhead, and everybody was a better user experience."

In addition to offering faster downloads of legitimate content, CacheLogic allows users to download part of a file and then resume downloading where they left off. That's because the company's content delivery network (CDN) for P2P file sharing, called VelociX, manages the experience.

The network is built on CacheLogic's appliance (logically named the Cachepliance), which builds a better P2P network by ensuring that as much traffic as possible stays close to the user, not leaving the ISP's network. This reduces P2P overhead drastically, the company says. (For more, see Building a Better P2P Delivery System.)

The Cachepliance was specifically designed to improve traffic handling for distributed P2P networks. Centralized P2P networks tend to get shut down by lawsuits, which is why, three years ago, we were skeptical about the Cachepliance. Yes, it was good, but was it legal?

Three years later, the company boasts customers around the world. Now CacheLogic is starting to court content owners (it was always interested in ISP customers). The company is offering a cheaper, more efficient delivery system for films and music.

The question remains, however, as to whether there will be any takers.

Will there be movies for everyone?
Parker says his company is ready. "They can give us a digital asset for distribution, which is how a traditional CDN works, or, if the company is already using P2P, we can get it off the P2P network."

It's clear that there will soon be more legitimate video content on P2P networks. Parker points to several companies that are experimenting with P2P as a method for distributing content. The biggest trial so far is BBC's integrated media player (iMP), but other companies are also using the technology. Warner Brothers, for example, announced a service called In2Movies. One year ago, Peer Impact had already signed agreements with four content owners to distribute content over P2P [.pdf].

As the market develops, a key question for ISPs and end users is the extent to which DRM will be allowed to control the user experience. The popular blog BoingBoing, affiliated with the EFF, is a noted DRM skeptic. The site points out that DRM has, variously: installed rootkits (Sony), been designed to make copies fail (CinemaNow), shortened iPod battery life (Apple), crashed TiVOs, and nevertheless, in many cases, is easily circumvented (numerous). BoingBoing argues that DRM is both bad for users and doesn't work anyway (the traditional anti-prohibition argument).

So, once again, we are skeptical of CacheLogic's product. We doubt the commitment of the content owners to a market for content on the internet. We believe that the companies that opposed the VCR and even music radio will attach unbearable restrictions to legal content traded over the internet.

But these are good times for CacheLogic. In addition to its partnership with Bit Torrent and its new VelociX product, the company recently announced that it received $20 million in Series C funding and it announced a very large customer, True Internet, Thailand's leading ISP, which has about 400,000 subscribers.

Pricing and availability
VelociX and the Cachepliance are available now. Pricing for the Cachepliance is not disclosed. Every ISP that has a Cachepliance can become part of the VelociX network for free.

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