[by barrypei@tianyaclub]

Nowadays P2P applications is common and popular in media downloads. And P2P has already been adopted by live TV broadcast of TV media which greately change the tranditional media market.
COOLSTREAMING is one of the early P2P live TV broadcast software. It is the chinese edition of a foreign software. For its simple user interface, few program sources, non- smooth broadcast, COOLSTREAMING is not so popular.
Now a new software PPLIVE becomes more and more popular. PPLIVE has cetain web sites to provide program sources just like BT. It provides much smoother programs than COOLSTREAMING and only 10 sec for buffering is needed. To some extent, PPLIVE is a great example that successfully integrates P2P technology to media streaming. WhatĄŻa more, data is buffering in the memory, not on the hard disk. So no harm to the hard disk, and better performance than BT.
Actually, for online video on demand programs, 1 to many is frequently used in tranditional server broadcasting model. If the user number exceeds certain limitation, users can not get smooth and stable programs. Fortunately, P2P successfully solves the problems when integrated in online TV broadcast. It has the character that more users are online, the faster the programs can be loaded. This character requires the media producer to produce more wonderful programs for the reason that the stability of the program absolutely depends on the content of the programs.
The online live Sports games and Hot TV programs may atract many people in deed.
(announcement: the author here is to recommand a softare to the reader and has no relation with PPLIVE software provider )
Download: http://www.pplive.com