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Comment by hack_edu | Hacker News Reader

The patent is about breaking peers out into small sub-swarms to look after each other. The more healthy peers in each group focusing to keep their's groups healthy while also keeping up with the larger swarm. The greater BitTorrent protocol doesn't do this and, judging by the patent filing, other p2p streaming applications don't either, hence why they fall down upon high demand.

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> other p2p streaming applications don't either,hence why they fall down upon high demand.

This patent does not claim anything novel. This idea of "clubs of peers" or groups has been around for a while.

This well known paper from Torino, Italy, written a few years ago: "overlays are maintained by peers organized in clusters that represent sets of collaborating peers", http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TMM.2010.2077623

Disclaimer: my research team is part of the open IETF Internet Standard on P2P streaming which is directly competing with this patented technology, http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ppsp-peer-protoco...

Anybody else has an even older citation of prior art?

The traditional overlay approach involves a bunch of full trees, and uses multiple trees as a way around dealing with leaf nodes being unutilized. My approach uses multiple groupings, which do not overlay, screams within them, and does something completely different for the last hop. They're completely different architectures. I have trouble taking seriously any paper which says that it makes heavy use of multiple description coding. If you have congestion control, skips should be an extreme and bad event.

There have been several p2p low-latency streaming companies in the past with swarming, some of which where acqui-killed by CDN companies like Akamai. But since I haven't read the app, I won't go as far as to critique the filing.

I think the big challenge for this is that traditional bandwidth is becoming cheap, and anyone who cares about QOS can pay for it and/or build out their own distribution network.

Curious what companies these were? Haven't heard of any of this.

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