CoolStreaming
Encyclopedia
CoolStreaming is a P2PTV
P2PTV
The term P2PTV refers to peer-to-peer software applications designed to redistribute video streams in real time on a P2P network; the distributed video streams are typically TV channels from all over the world but may also come from other sources...

 (peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

 television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

) technology that enables users to share television content with each other over the Internet. The technology behind CoolStreaming is similar to that of BitTorrent. The viewers upload content at the same time the programs are downloaded and viewed. CoolStreaming creates a local stream on localhost and that stream is then read by Windows Media Player, Real Player or other media players. The original coolstreaming code is developed with Python 2.3 on Windows.

Coolstreaming is a data-centric design of peer-to-peer streaming overlay
Overlay network
An overlay network is a computer network which is built on the top of another network. Nodes in the overlay can be thought of as being connected by virtual or logical links, each of which corresponds to a path, perhaps through many physical links, in the underlying network...

. Notable features of the protocol include its intelligent scheduling algorithm that copes well with the bandwidth differences of uploading clients and thus minimises skipping during playback, and its swarm-style architecture that uses a directed graph based on gossip algorithims to broadcast content availability.

Coolstreaming is the first P2PTV system that attracts a remarkable amount of clients (over 1 million, while most of the previous systems attracted less than 1 thousand clients).

As of June 10, 2005 the Coolstreaming service had stopped due to copyright issues.
However, there are several alternative services.

CoolStreaming is the base technology for Roxbeam Corp., which launched live IPTV programs jointly with Yahoo Japan in October 2006.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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