CenterSpan Offers Peer-To-Peer StreamingCenterSpan Offers Peer-To-Peer Streaming

CenterSpan Communications, which has been quietly working on a peer-to-peer distribution network since it exited the market for peer-to-peer game joysticks, is betting heavily on consumer acceptance of streamed media. The company is debuting a peer-to-peer streaming app it developed for the C-star distribution system that was announced last month. Both the software and the distribution system are intended to help content providers cut costs on delivery infrastructure and bandwidth.

The unnamed app breaks streamed media files into small pieces and stores the pieces on PCs throughout its peer network. Then, when users request that a file be streamed, a client app searches the network for each piece of the stream, determines the connection speed and availability of each location, and delivers the file as if it were being streamed from a Web site.

All content on the network is supplied by content providers, and users are unable to publish to the network. Moreover, chief technical officer Michael Hudson says the security concerns of content providers are a high priority. Hudson says each file undergoes a digital-signature check each time it enters and leaves a PC, verifying that it's the same file when it leaves that it was when it entered. If any changes to a file are detected, the transfer is aborted, and the user is removed from the company's list of source PCs.

CenterSpan gained modest fame last December when it bought the assets of file-sharing community Scour. The company is using Scour.com as a forum for demonstrating how C-star distribution and streaming apps work. The streaming software is about to enter beta testing. Hudson says that while the company is considering selling the technology to companies interested in using peer environments for securely moving files, it is focused on customers looking to generate revenue from streaming, namely the entertainment and media markets.

Gartner analyst Rob Batchelder says CenterSpan is missing its biggest opportunity by not focusing on selling to big companies, which could use the technology for internal distribution and wouldn't be under pressure to generate revenue with it. He says the concept of peer streaming "is fascinating," but that in a consumer setting it combines the spotty bandwidth of peer networks with the fact that content providers have yet to establish streaming media as a profit center. "My instant reaction is one of retching," says Batchelder. "Here's a bad technology that goes against a bad business model."

Hudson admits that peer-to-peer networks offer unpredictable bandwidth, but he says the company's mediation technology--which constantly tests the connections of the peers, dropping slow ones and changing to fast ones during data retrieval--is designed to overcome that problem.