Legal peer-to-peer movie sharing on the way via GT TV

[silicon_toad2000]

http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/legal-peertopeer-movie-sharing-on-the-way-via-gt-tv-20141112-11l5t7.html

dejavu?

GT TV claims to have Australian and New Zealand rights to more than 5000 movies and 5000 TV episodes.

"Between Civic and ourselves we have signed agreements with nine studios and we have terms with two," Sampson said.

"That is all the major Hollywood studios except one and most of the Australian indies. We're in technical evaluation with all of them."

Consumers will be able to buy the unit online from Civic Video's website.

GT TV is using its own patent-pending Secure Peer Assist technology that uses a mixture of peer-to-peer technology and a conventional content delivery network, EdgeCast, to distribute the movies. Sampson claims it will be the world's first legal peer-to peer network for movies.

How it works

With peer-to-peer networking the data for each customer's movie is pulled from multiple other customers who have that same movie on their device. It is then reassembled at the customer's end.The technology is widely used for downloading content illicitly.

The hardware unit will act as a computer, seeking and streaming the movie to the user.

Civic CEO Rod Laycock told Fairfax media the company saw the quality guarantee as a key differentiator.

"The attractive point of difference is that because it is based on a new style of technology it ensures that content is in HD format all the time. Many of the others advertise HD but it is not always true HD that is delivered."

Paul Brooks, director of communications consultancy Layer 10 Advisory, said GT TV's use of peer-to-peer technology should ensure faster downloads than other content delivery networks because it came from multiple locations simultaneously.

"Peer-to-peer is a perfectly viable way of transferring content," he said. "You get less issue with round-trip delay and with latency between the server and the user"

[GhostShip]

I wonder whats new and innovative about this, theres not much in the way of technical detail here, its sounding like sequential bit torrent with a set level of buffering to compensate for propagation delays, no doubt we will find out soon enough.

I suppose the peer to peer portion will be backed by a few servers to allow for times when there are a limited number of peers or you could use a few more and have your model just use your own server farm of about 20 units to deliver the content that operate as seeders and use the peer to peer side of things as a load sharing backup.