P2P-Next Bags €14M

BRUSSELS -- P2P-Next, a pan-European conglomerate of 21 industrial partners, media content providers and research institutions, has received a €14 million grant from the European Union. The grant will enable the conglomerate to carry out a research project aiming to identify the potential uses of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology for Internet Television of the future. The partners, including the BBC, Delft University of Technology, the European Broadcasting Union, Lancaster University, Markenfilm, Pioneer and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, intend to develop a Europe-wide “next-generation” internet television distribution system, based on P2P and social interaction.

P2P-Next statement:

“The P2P-Next project will run over four years, and plans to conduct a large-scale technical trial of new media applications running on a wide range of consumer devices. If successful, this ambitious project could create a platform that would enable audiences to stream and interact with live content via a PC or set top box. In addition, it is our intention to allow audiences to build communities around their favourite content via a fully personalized system.

This technology could potentially be built into VOD services in the future and plans are underway to test the system for broadcasting the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest live online.

We will have an open approach towards sharing results. All core software technology will be available as open source, enabling new business models. P2P-Next will also address a number of outstanding challenges related to content delivery over the internet, including technical, legal, regulatory, security, business and commercial issues.”

British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC)