The typical Hank article I read is pretty well balanced and reasons out things logically. Not this one, it seems to be completely overblown, but that's nothing new, since the death of CDN's have been predicted for the last several years due to a new entrants in P2P technologies.<p>If you want a balanced take on P2P and CDN's, read the article and comments on Dan Rayburn's blog: <a href="http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2008/04/p2p-vendors-str.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/200...</a><p>The CDN market is probably close to 1 billion $ and the major players are not going anywhere. To get an understanding of the future of CDN's read this interview with one of the co-founders of Panther Express: <a href="http://www.contentinople.com/author.asp?section_id=450&doc_id=149694" rel="nofollow">http://www.contentinople.com/author.asp?section_id=450&d...</a>, where he claims that the Future of CDN's is http.<p>I have no idea how Adobe's P2P technology works, each P2P company seems to have a different approach to content delivery.<p><i>Disclosure: I have worked for a couple of CDN's in the past.</i>
People use CDN's because they want increased quality of service.<p>I don't see how using p2p technology gives you a decent QoS.<p>If I told my clients (the large blue chips that ask about CDN's, anyway) that we won't be using Akamai, but instead will be relying on a brand new p2p network they would walk away laughing...
Wow, Hank finds something that <i>doesn't</i> suck! Circle this day in your calendars.<p>I agree this is big -- at least for P2P. And if it doesn't immediately put CDNs at risk, while the kinks are being worked out... give it time. Think about how long awkward web video muddled along before finally Adobe FLV, plus a critical mass of broadband adoption, caused video usage to explode.<p>When Adobe first dropped hints about bundling P2P capabilities, over a year ago, I called it 'Adob2p' [1]. Then, as now, I think the big question is whether the resulting p2p distribution capability will be open to anyone with popular content, regardless of license or commercial status, or if Adobe will try to collect a toll per byte transferred.<p>[1] <a href="http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2007/01/adob2p-can-adobe-do-for-web-p2p-what.html" rel="nofollow">http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2007/01/adob2p-can-adobe-do-for-w...</a>
There is a major flaw. A flash-based P2P network is only available among people who have their browser open at that very moment. So it cannot replace torrents because people don't leave their browsers open to seed for other people. When they are done, they close their browsers.<p>And from what I understand of the spare documentation, closed source clients are going to need to pay license fees to interact with this P2P network.<p>And did you happen to notice the "Secure Media" part of the protocol?<p>This is a DRM encumbered, Non-Commercial, GPL infected protocol. I don't think it will be very successful.
i think there are going to be bumpy times ahead for P2P-based companies that depend on a limitless supply of upstream transfer bytes from a home. upstream bandwidth seems like the scarce commodity and it is just a matter of time before it is throttled back. my humble opinion, of course.<p>i have a vudu box and when i'm not using it, it is always disconnected from the net because i don't want to be throttled by my cable service provider (or, more likely, not have it throttled but wonder if it is being throttled every time there's a slow down).
So CDNs may lose some customers that use Flash, but that's about it. This doesn't help anyone who just wants standard HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images.
Was it not possible before to create, say, a bittorrent client in Flash? Not sure what Flash was capable of (I know it can network, but maybe only HTTP?).