Internet users may have to help distribute online video clips to combat the growing costs delivering such content. That鈥檚 the conclusion of researchers at Microsoft who have studied how peer-to-peer networks could reduce costs for sites like YouTube that spend millions every month to make videos available over the web.
Cheng Huang and Jin Li from Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, US, worked with of Polytechnic University in New York, US. They used nine months鈥� worth of records from the MSN video site servers to work out how to reduce the costs of meeting around 60 million requests for clips every month.
鈥淭he current model is not really sustainable,鈥� Ross told 快猫短视频, 鈥淢icrosoft is certainly interested in the possibility of using peer-to-peer technologies, where users distribute video amongst themselves.鈥�
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Video sharing sites currently pay for bandwidth on a 鈥減er bit鈥� basis. So the more popular they are, they more they pay for bandwidth. Canadian researchers estimate that Google-owned YouTube pays out around 2 million US dollars a month distributing clips, in addition to other costs such as servers and staffing costs.
Small sacrifice
The MSN video data spanned a period from April to December 2006 when users made over 520 million requests for more 59,000 videos. The Microsoft team used it to simulate how web users could share the video they were watching with each other, perhaps using a plug-in for a conventional browser such as Internet Explorer.
Instead of downloading the clip they wanted from an MSN server, they would receive it from other users who were already watching it. The data showed that each user would only need to donate a small part of their upload capacity for the network perform as well as the current setup.
Switching to a peer-to-peer technology could cut the costs of distributing video by more than 95 per cent, say the researchers. MSN鈥檚 servers would only need to provide new clips for the first time, or when making up any shortfalls.
Costs halved
The team also suggest a way to prevent Internet Service Providers鈥� costs jumping when their users start uploading much more data. The trick is to allow sharing only between people with the same provider, when data transactions are free.
That restriction would cut the pool of sharers into smaller groups, meaning MSN鈥檚 servers would have to do more to fill any gaps in the service. But costs could still fall by more than half, simulations showed.
, one of the largest US ISPs, already limits users of peer-to-peer network BitTorrent in this way, says Cameron Dale, from Simon Fraser University, Canada. 鈥淚t鈥檚 an interesting idea and one that is not hard to implement,鈥� he says.
The was presented at the conference in Kyoto, Japan, in August.
