Packet Pollution - Microsoft and Akamia Working on HD Video Streaming
Microsoft and Akamai Technologies are teaming up on high-definition video streaming efforts for PCs, the companies said Tuesday.
Akamai plans to release a beta service, AdaptiveEdge Streaming for Microsoft Silverlight, early next year to select media customers. It will run on Windows Server 2008 with Microsoft’s Silverlight media player.
This makes total sense but the interesting thing is what will Microsoft and Akamia do with P2P. Will Microsoft leverage the Red Swoosh piece of Akamia or will this be another CDN based approach.
CDN based approaches cause unwanted inefficiencies in the network in that as more users view and watch popular content there is traffic congestion. Unicast solutions cause traffic or packet pollution. Legit P2P can solve this.
Microsoft is smart to build intelligence into their Silverlight client and having dynamic “policy” to manage traffic and content navigation is the cornerstone of their strategy. Why? It helps minimize the conjestion issue and provides for a better user experience. This two concept are not mutually exclusive.
I hope to hear more about this from Microsoft.