P2P-plugin to accelerate downloading video from resources

20th September 2008

The Shanghai company PPLive, the developer of the popular P2P-platform of the same name, for distributing video content, has presented its new application.
The program PPVA is also based on the popular technologies of peering networks and helps to accelerate downloading and playback of video in a Flash, which is transmitted via the net in the streaming format. In order to evaluate the benefits of the new technology the user only has to download a small client application called PPVA.
At detecting the stream of Flash-video, the program automatically finds other users of PPVA, who already have watched the video and, therefore, having a copy of this video, in their cache. Thus, only the first few frames are downloaded from the original server while the further data exchange is made between members of file-sharing networks. Given the attendance of some video sources (for example, YouTube ) the proposed solution allows significant reducing the load on the server. As in traditional P2P-solutions, the speed of downloading the video directly depends on its popularity.
The proposed technology has its flaws, however: you can not see the statistics on watching this or that video.
Now, the program is available only in Chinese, but the developers are working on it.