Red Swoosh is a P2P desktop client which appears to
compete against the BitTorrent client. It's a very promising technology in
a Web world increasingly filled with video and other large multimedia files. Red Swoosh
is a desktop client (Windows only) that enables users to download and stream files from
each other, rather than from webservers. It works like this: you signup to the service, then when you have a large file that you want to publish on your website, you "swoosh" the
link by adding http://edn.redswoosh.net to the front of the URL; then when a user
clicks on a swooshed link, they are prompted to install the Red Swoosh client if he/she
has not previously done so. Red Swoosh uses http and not a specific p2p protocol like bittorrent.
Red Swoosh claims to offer the most efficient P2P file-sharing system on the internet. One of the investors behind the company is Mark Cuban, who recently wrote a long post about why BitTorrent is doomed (via TorrentFreak). His point was that the bittorrent protocol is actually no more efficient in terms of bandwidth than the client-server setup. Incidentally Cuban doesn't mention his affiliation with Red Swoosh in that post (he may've done so before, I'm not sure). But Cuban's post is clearly aimed at pumping up Red Swoosh over BitTorrent, albeit indirectly, so a disclosure would've been in order.
Over on the Red Swoosh blog there's an interesting post about how P2P can save Apple $15 Million. I corresponded with one of the Red Swoosh developers to find out more. He told me the premise behind it is that P2P is the future of distribution, especially for popular outlets like iTunes. He told me:
"Bandwidth is a bottleneck. That didn't matter to much when we were just sending and receiving pictures and music, but video is going to break the camel's back."
In the post they looked at Apple's iTunes store and calculated how much money is spent on bandwidth for the millions of songs, movies, and TV shows being transferred. They believe that $15 M is being "wasted" by Apple not converting to p2p.
The Red Swoosh team seems very confident of their chances in the P2P and video file transfer business:
"At Redswoosh, we're commited to making the best p2p system on the web. We're already hitting akamai numbers, and that's in small tests where the network effect of p2p hasn't really kicked in.
If you think BitTorrent is fast, just wait till you try Swooshing."
What do you think of the technology - does it have as much potential as BitTorrent?
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Steve Jobs may well already be thinking in this direction. Last spring Mac OS rumors posted an "insider tip" that:
'"Leopard" [MacOS 10.5] will include a system-level "BitTorrent" filesharing client that can be user-customized to 'donate' upstream Internet bandwidth for things like pushing Software Update packages to Leopard users, delivering iTunes Store content, and just about any purpose to which Apple puts its bandwidth. ...Rewards would include credit at the iTunes Store and the Apple Store as well as other affililated offers like free airtime minutes for Apple's forthcoming "iPhone" and the like.'
Posted by: W.B. McNamara | January 25, 2007 1:23 PM
Will consumers really want to pay (via their donated bandwidth) for corporations to distribute files with nothing in return? I mean, what would be the benefit for the user to give away their upstream bandwidth to Apple so that Apple can make more money? Unless there are user rewards as W.B. McNamara--and of near equal value, or at least value enough to justify potentially slower uploads, Skype calls, video chats, etc.--then I don't see users biting. And if you're giving rewards, the math becomes a bit hazier about how much you'll be saving and if it's really worth it.
Posted by: Josh | January 25, 2007 2:29 PM
I don't see the advantage of Red Swoosh's system over bittorrent. Except maybe that it uses http, which makes it harder for ISP's to ban/traffic shape.
Posted by: Andrew | January 25, 2007 7:05 PM
Josh,
You raise an important issue which can easily not be an issue if consumers weren't paying for their access because it was free, aka subsidized - subsidized by who? it doesn't matter if its google, budweiser, msft, orcl, salesforce.com, yahoo, whoever because it will be most efficient to capture your attentin via the internet. The cost of sales, when collectively shared across(for example sake) Fortune 1000 companies will be miniscule compared to what it takes now for a F1000 to generate the equivalent revenue. Sounds far fetched but with multiplexing and better local peering, the costs of transporting bits will continue to trend down. The cost of 10megs in most colo's has gone from $10,000 to $2000 tops(for a 10meg commit) and you can get pricing under $20/mbps from tier one networks if you are committing to a gig or so which is what 20 hours of connectivity at 14.4k cost in 1995. Simply maintaining that cost trend will produce an end result which is counter intuitive and certainly rocks the boat of the old school telco guys and that is: They should and will be paying you to get on their network. It might not be the carrier or network provider coughing up the $ to pay you in an actual sense but you will certainly receive the equivalent value or utility that you experience now for the fees you pay now.
tomo
Posted by: tomo | January 25, 2007 9:24 PM
our system pays you cash. and, i don't think Apple will come out with that...i've been to the iTunes store, and know how they do it.
Posted by: lemon obrien | January 25, 2007 10:24 PM
Travis has been slogging away for a long time on Red Swoosh and it shows in the quality of the product. Unlike Bittorrent, where only active downloaders are uploaders, Red Swoosh can pull politely from anyone who has downloaded in the past, which creates a lot more peers to pull from, and hence faster download speeds
Posted by: jeremy liew | January 25, 2007 11:36 PM
It's interesting as this seems to be one area where Joost thinks it can beat Apple by using distributed file sharing for its video offerings. I think Apple can take advantage of distributed file sharing if it needs to and the pay off for end users is that they get faster downloads for less. Part of the cost for buying things on iTunes is the bandwidth and if Apple were to implement some sort of distributed file sharing for iTunes downloads it could potentially drop prices or maintain current prices in the face of rising bandwidth costs.
Posted by: Billy | January 27, 2007 8:55 PM
I wonder if they would have spent that 15M of savings on copywrite suits / customer service complaints when hackers exploit the P2P network ... My bandwidth is as precious as your's ... why would I give mine away for nothing?
Posted by: Matt | January 29, 2007 10:41 AM