Swoosh: before Bittorrent
p2p news / p2pnet: Does BitTorrent have a rival?
Red Swoosh says it’s, "dedicated to providing zero-cost file and video delivery" by incorporating best of breed p2p technology where users download and stream files from each other, rather than from servers.
They simply add "http://edn.redswoosh.net" in front of links, says the site, going on:
"The download and stream looks just like before but the content is actually coming from up to 30 different peers that have previously downloaded or streamed content. All future swooshed links appear as normal downloads and video streams, except that the vast majority of data is [sic] pulled from peers instead of servers."
In the free version, every fifth download request, "is shown an interstitial advertisement before the download begins," says TechCrunch, going on, "Customers can bypass the ads to their users by paying for the service.
"If you choose to create an account, Red Swoosh will provide reporting to you on download statistics, and in the future will share revenue from advertising. This last bit is important.
"There are some limitations to Red Swoosh. Users must install a client to facilitate the download. This is only required once – subsequent downloads from any Red Swoosh customer will then work. There is no client available for the Mac platorm yet, though. Red Swoosh promises it later this year. Until then, Mac users can still download the file directly from a server without using the P2P technology."
How much for Swoosh premium? $0.03 per user per month, with a $20 per month minimum.
"What most of you don’t know is that Red Swoosh has been here for years," says the Swoosh blog.
"Yes, long before Bittorrent was a sparkle in Bram’s eye, we got going on the company in the final days of 2000 and launched our first Swooshed website, http://www.deviantart.com/ in 2001.
"Well, we were a bit early to market. . . . ummm, about 4 years, and we kept a tight ship as we waited for the big wave of digital distribution to hit. We kept things tight and pulled in customers where we could, ultimately doing great work for mostly really large websites paying 1000’s of dollars per month.
"We even got our first major investment from Mark Cuban last year, and signed dozens of customers since.
"But really, things still weren’t lighting up the way we think they could have or should have. We were so Web 1.0. We had “brochure-ware” that we put up on the site, and you could sign up for a newsletter. Then we would call you. . . old skool stylez, the equivalent of the rotary telephone for the Internet-set.
"Well, we knew that had to change. More and more folks were calling us for services, but most of them didn’t have the money to even register into our normal pricing schemes, and we certainly didn’t have product or the customer support infrastructure to support them.
"So we went to Thailand to Offshore Ourselves for 6 weeks in May and June, and we’ve come back with a vengeance."
Digg this.
Also See:
TechCrunch – Use Red Swoosh to Serve Files For Free, July 5, 2006
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July 9th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
I don’t know if the requirement of an extra client will allow it to catch on. Brahm Cohen’s BitTorrent client was at least in a portable language. (python)
Mark Cuban – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Cuban