CNN and P2P on Inauguration Day

Sunday, February 8, 2009

James Robertson

I'm not really sure where I ran across it, but a recent article on Windows Secrets caught my attention. According to the article, CNN used a peer-to-peer (P2P) service called Octoshape to help it stream the inauguration. The program apparently opens up a port on the viewer's computer in order to allow the program to share the viewer's bandwidth.

There are interesting implications here, and the article really only mentions the negative ones. While I can see his point on several of the issues (including deceptive marketing, security concerns, and net neutrality issues), there are some positives to the idea of an arguably successful example of cloud computing.

Cloud computing allows users to gain more hardware (and obviously bandwidth) capabilities by connecting with other computers when they need it. In this case, CNN leveraged the technology to get a freebie, but cloud computing services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud can be bought and paid for. Cloud computing can be a source of extra computing power for people who can't buy a 20 petaflop supercomputer--for example, non-profits or under-developed nations. If you've seen those IBM commercials, you know what's possible with a computer that can do 20 thousand trillion floating point operations per second (that's what "20 petaflops" means).

So are CNN's actions unscrupulous, or do they serve the greater good by showing what's possible with cloud computing? Let me know what you think.