19 Million Euro for P2P research


The European Union is funding a P2P research project called ​P2P-Next. The EU pays 14M€ to P2P-Next, the remaining 5M€ is donated by the 21 project partners.

The Tribler team will contribute their 2-year long operational P2P experience to P2P-Next. We secured additional funding for 2008-2012 to do more research into P2P and to enhance Tribler.

As the biggest P2P-Next partner (in terms of man years) we are responsible for crafting and building the next-generation of P2P technology. It will be an academically pure architecture: no central servers will be needed, combined with Bittorrent backwards compatibility. Within a year we hope to release to the public: Live Playlists (a P2P-version of RSS feeds to enable user-generated metadata), Wiki-style moderation, and a reputation system for spam-prevention plus sharing ratio enforcement.

We are pleased to be part of P2P-Next. It includes very strong partners such as the BBC and is commited to Open Source, full details can be found in the press release below.



Official press release

European research project to shape next generation internet TV

Brussels, 19 February 2008 - P2P-Next, a pan-European conglomerate of 21 industrial partners, media content providers and research institutions, has received a €14 million grant from the European Union. The grant will enable the conglomerate to carry out a research project aiming to identify the potential uses of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology for Internet Television of the future. The partners,* including the BBC, Delft University of Technology, the European Broadcasting Union, Lancaster University, Markenfilm, Pioneer Digital Design Centre Limited and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, intend to develop a Europe-wide “next-generation” internet television distribution system, based on P2P and social interaction.

P2P-Next statement

“The P2P-Next project will run over four years, and plans to conduct a large-scale technical trial of new media applications running on a wide range of consumer devices. If successful, this ambitious project could create a platform that would enable audiences to stream and interact with live content via a PC or set top box. In addition, it is our intention to allow audiences to build communities around their favourite content via a fully personalized system.
 
This technology could potentially be built into Video on Demand (VOD) services in the future and plans are underway to test the system for major broadcasting events.
 
The project has an open approach towards sharing results. All core software technology will be available as open source, enabling new business models. P2P-Next will also address a number of outstanding challenges related to content delivery over the internet, including technical, legal, regulatory, security, business and commercial issues.”

Luis Rodríguez-Roselló, Head of Unit of Networked Media at the European Union, stresses his satisfaction for the launching of the new R&D project P2P-Next.

"This ambitious project is investigating new ways to deliver video using the P2P paradigm making possible to everybody to distribute videos from anywhere to any number of people anywhere in the world. It will be a live trial of the future media internet we are envisioning. Europe can be proud of having very high quality broadcasting, content and telecommunication sectors. So, I ensure that the project we are launching today will help European stakeholders to be at the frontline in pioneering the looming media revolution enabled by the internet."

Dr. Pouwelse from Delft University of Technology the P2P-Next scientific director:

"P2P technology already dominates Internet traffic and is key to our research and development mission of making near-zero cost TV broadcasting available to all Europeans. Prior experience with Tribler, our own P2P software, enables us to contribute the core technology for finding, viewing, and sharing."

The complete list of Partners

  • STMicroelectronics - Milan, Italy www.st.com

What is Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology

P2P provides an alternative to the traditional client/server architecture of computer networks and signifies the next big step in the evolution of internet media delivery. While employing the existing broadband networks, each participating computer, referred to as peer, functions as both a client and a server for a given application. A P2P network enables the sharing of content files or streams with audio, video and data content. Today it is considered increasingly as a potentially efficient and reliable mechanism for distributing any media to the general public worldwide.

P2P-Next in a nutshell

P2P-Next will develop an open source, efficient, trusted, personalized, user-centric and participatory television and media delivery mechanism with social and collaborative connotations using the emerging P2P paradigm, which takes into account the existing EU legal framework.