Cisco to Distribute Grid Networks’ P2P Client
Cisco will include Grid Networks‘ peer-to-peer software in its home networking products, alongside participation in the company’s Series A round. “They’re going to embed the GridCast client into edge devices in millions of households in the coming year-plus,” Grid Networks CEO Tony Naughtin told us last week.
Cisco had actually all along been an investor in the company’s $9.5 Series A round, which was led by Panorama Capital, but hadn’t disclosed its involvement until now.
Grid Networks is also in production trials with a couple of “satellite-, cable-type TV networks” for streaming live television, said Naughtin. “Our system was built to scale to Nielsen-sized audiences,” he emphasized. The Seattle-based company gives publishers tools to manage and distribute their content, combining its proprietary peer-to-peer system with commodity conventional content delivery to ensure reliability alongside lower costs.
Naughtin, who said he considers his company’s main competitor to be Move Networks, added in a swipe at the rest of the sector: “There are distinct differences between what we’re doing and BitTorrent, Pando, Swarmcast, and Itiva. It’s difficult to take a software company and turn it into a service provider.”
We’re in the middle of a land grab among these companies as they try to avoid making end users manually install their clients. Cisco is a pretty good coup for Grid Networks. Move Networks recently cut a deal to be included in Silverlight. BitTorrent’s CEO bragged about his own tie-ups in a recent video interview we posted.
Apologies: this had been announced earlier last week, but got stuck in my story pipeline.
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I am amazed that P2P as a general Internet protocol has so many companies trying to OWN it. It’s like a company trying to own HTTP.
As HTTP is an open standard, any widely accepted P2P protocol should be the same.
I am not surprised that some companies are trying to own this technology as the P2P networks are likely to carry data in which some type of transaction is connected to it. Either purchased content or content with commercials
These P2P networks appear to be trying to build a virtual gateway in which they will shave some $ from these tractions.
I personally do not see a huge future in this as a open based P2P standard will eventuate, and if not now, in the future. Supporting these proprietary implementations is very unproductive in my opinion.
Examples of this is the European movement to implement a P2P open standard (Do not have the link on me but see my blog for more info)
Or a recent post on newteevee at http://newteevee.com/2008/03/14/how-verizon-wants-to-speed-up-your-bittorrent-videos/
where we have ISPs implementing additions to P2P protocals to make it work more efficiently within their network. Ie like a HTTP-proxy but for P2P protocols. (Not exactly but archives a similar result.)
CISCO making this move appears a little questionable to me.
James
James Gardikner on March 16th, 2008 at 2:56 am - Permalink
[...] announced that it will embed peer-2-peer software from GRID NETWORKS in its home-networking products, after recently revealing that it was a major [...]
2008 03-17 MediaBytes: DriverTV - Grid Networks - Rapt - Yahoo! Buzz - Microsoft | MediaBytes with Shelly Palmer on March 17th, 2008 at 5:28 am - Permalink
[...] announced that it will embed P2P from GRID NETWORKS in its home-networking products, after recently revealing that it was a major [...]
2008 03-17 MediaBytes: DriverTV - Grid Networks - Rapt - Yahoo! Buzz - Microsoft | MediaBytes with Shelly Palmer on March 17th, 2008 at 6:57 am - Permalink
[...] that it has taken investment from Comcast Interactive Capital. The funding was part of a previously announced $9.5 million Series A round whose participants have trickled out over [...]
GridNetworks: Comcast Invested in Us, Too « NewTeeVee on May 18th, 2008 at 10:46 pm - Permalink