Saving the best for last in the morning keynote, Microsoft’s Sean Alexander yielded the stage to Skinkers CEO Matteo Berlucchi for the final ten minutes. Surrounded on both sides by large screens streaming BBC News, Berlucci described Skinkers LiveStation as “a solution that works.” For P2P live streaming.
Berlucchi did not go into specifics on the technology, directing people to their forthcoming Beta release to see it in action. Instead he focused on the issues that exist in the existing state of content delivery:
- Buffering
- Firewalls and security
- Scalability – Costly to deliver to large audiences
- The intricacies of the internet itself.
Berlucci claims that Skinkers product solves all these problems by:
- Leveraging the nature of the internet
- Leveraging the power of the participants
- Preventing buffering
- Intelligent encoding
- Offering a cross-platform solution
- Offering cost-effective scalability.
Skinkers in other words is capable of cost-effectively delivering large, popular files and lowering the incremental costs faced by traditional CDNs.
Microsoft’s interest in commercial content delivery and their Silverlight Streaming CDN for developers may be the first step to a full-blown entry into the CDN market utilizing an entirely new method for delivery.
[...] First off, Ben Homer has what seems to be the very first coverage ever of this, so my apologies. Secondly, my commentors mentioned that this isn’t a Microsoft [...]
[...] LiveStation has hit Techmeme – Everyone’s talking about it now but still not much on how it works. (UPDATE: via Tilzy, Don Dodge has written more on how it works.) My two cents: Combining Silverlight with live streaming P2P technology has big implications. [...]