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EU embraces P2P - February 21, 2008

Here's something you're not likely to see on this side of the Atlantic: The European Union on Tuesday issued a grant worth 14 million euros ($22m) to P2P-Next, a consortium of universities, research institutions, content producers and distributors from 12 countries that aims to develop an open-source, peer-to-peer platform that could be used to distribute movies, television, radio and nearly every other kind of media content throughout Europe. The four-year project will include "a large-scale technical trial of new media applications running on a wide range of consumer devices," according to a statement posted on the group's web site.

Also teed up is a plan "to allow audiences to build communities around their favourite content via a fully personalized system," and tests of a video-on-demand system based on the platform as well as live broadcasts.

Although the group says it will "also address a number of outstanding challenges related to content delivery over the internet, including technical, legal, regulatory, security, business and commercial issues," the involvement of the EU could throw a major wrench into existing commercial plans for Internet delivery of movies and other content, many of which rely on proprietary technology and applications.

From the web site:

In such heterogeneous environments, efficient content delivery needs optimized unicast, multicast, broadcast, and also support for new mechanisms that have been made possible by the recent advances in P2P grids. This situation has important consequences for the existing business models and institutions, as well as for content production, content distribution, and end user experience on various terminals. This particular holds for stakeholders that propose services based on heterogeneous terminals and networks, together with the demand from users of transparent service continuity.

No kidding.

In response to these challenges, the objective of P2P-Next is to move forward the technical enablers to facilitate new business scenarios for the complete value chain in the content domain from a linear unidirectional push mode to a user centric, time and place independent platform paradigm. A platform approach allows modular development and modular applications, enables knowledge sharing and facilitates technology integration, code- and skill re-use. This translates to fast development of new content delivery applications that build value for service and content providers.

I'm sure Apple is thrilled with the idea of government-mandated "knowledge sharing" and "code and skill re-use."

This one seems worth watching.
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