With all of the excitement around online video and distributing digital content, you’d think peer-to-peer systems would be smack in the middle of things. But yesterday, when we visited a small conference1 for P2P companies, there was little of the excitement found elsewhere in the industry. It seems P2P, despite its being both efficient and entrenched, is still sorely in need of a business model.
At the conference, lawyers and an MPAA rep spoke of harsher legal precedents for hosting unauthorized content; CacheLogic2 and BigChampagne3 reiterated that P2P traffic is growing; Kontiki4 (now owned by VeriSign) said its long-planned distribution deal with the BBC still won’t be live till next year.
There was a token guy5 bragging about a new anonymous open P2P network, and a bunch of people talking about using advertising6 and marketing7 tools to support filesharing (we wrote8 about another such effort, Skyrider9, yesterday). Sony exec Mitch Singer stopped by to discuss an multi-device token system for using your own content that he says he’s been working on for four years.
The legit P2P efforts such as StreamCast10, iMesh11, Mashboxx12, and Wurld Media13 were apparently not in attendance. They didn’t come up in conversation except to contemplate StreamCast’s recent court loss14 (over an older version of its software).
