Virtually every Web user will have a Flash Player from Adobe
installed, as it’s one of those must haves if you want to do anything
multimedia on the Internet. But now, there is an updated version
available, with many new features.
Here, Jef Pearlman of Public
Knowledge discusses the possibilities it provides for online video
distribution.
Flash Gets Flashier With P2P
If you haven’t heard yet, a beta of Adobe’s
Flash Player Version 10 is
available for download. It offers a host of new
features, but one has implications that blow the others out of the
water: built-in peer-to-peer. That’s
right, all the tools necessary to build a p2p client will be built into
the Flash plug-in.
Everyone who installs Flash 10 (and before long, that will be
practically everyone) will soon have peer-to-peer clients running in
their web browser of choice. What does this do?
Increasing P2P Use
First, it strengthens
the case for p2p by putting existing technology in the hands of, well,
everyone. We know that these tools are being used more and more for
legal, non-infringing, copyright-owner-endorsed purposes.
But when
everyone and their brother is viewing legally distributed videos
through p2p, it’s going to be a lot harder to make the
argument that
the technology is the bad guy.
Second, increased p2p usage is going to further increase
demand for
upload capacity in home broadband. This will put more strain on
networks with limited upstream bandwidth, pushing more network
upgrades, and potentially increasing the demand for network management
tools by ISPs.
At the same time, it will demonstrate why picking and
choosing individual protocols is not a legitimate way to manage an
ISP’s network – both because of its implications
for competition and
because of the was in which it slows innovation and hurts users.
Other Uses
There are a lot of uses of ubiquitous p2p besides video
distribution of course, and Hank Williams mentions a couple in his blog post:
things like friend-to-friend file transfers and rapid prototyping of
new (and perhaps innovative) applications.
And since the details are
still sketchy, and there are some arguments that Flash’s p2p
won’t be
all that (check out Williams’ follow-up post for details). But I
think Adobe would be crazy not to make it is
powerful and flexible as possible, especially in the video distribution
world. Adobe owns embedded web video.
And if Adobe can offer companies like YouTube
the capability to reduce their bandwidth costs (by sharing that burden
with users) and improve user experience, why wouldn’t Adobe
do so?
Conclusions
In the end, Flash p2p won’t be the only p2p out
there. Opera
has a BitTorrent
client built in, and Vuze
offers a media player with BitTorrent under the hood. Both of these
applications will continue to have their place, and innovation will
continue elsewhere. Client-server flash video won’t be
disappearing
either.
But the sheer number of people who install Flash makes this a
wake-up call for those who think p2p should or will go away any time
soon.
Jef Pearlman is an author at Public Knowledge discussing public rights in the emerging digital culture. Post has Some Rights Reserved.
