The Peer-to-Peer Research Institute gives a review of technological developments. Go here for the full articles and the links.

Excerpt:

“As we have written about before on this blog, BitTorrent is not good for streaming video due to its rarest-first download ordering policy. In order to stream video, or music, or whatever – you want it to arrive in a predictable order. Typically that order is linear, starting at the start. This way data arrives in the order of consumption. But BitTorrent does not provide this. In fact, it almost explicitly guarantees that it will not order data in a linear fashion. BitTorrent trades predictable ordering for replication increases. Under BitTorrent, the rarest pieces of data will be replicated the most, and so become less rare.

So what, then?

Companies are instead developing their own protocols. The EU has given 19 million euro to one P2P group which is modifying the BitTorrent protocol to support streaming – presumably by doing away with the rarest-first policy.

China has a number of well-funded start ups developing their own P2P video streaming technologies. Blin.cn claims to be 50x faster than BitTorrent for video streaming. Google is an investor in Chinese streaming company Xunlei.

And of course BitTorrent, Inc have been working to develop their own video streaming version of their protocol.”