Akamai has finally made a big push into P2P by acquiring Santa Monica based RedSwoosh for $15 million in stock for stock transaction.
RedSwoosh uses a technology similar to that of bittorrent to quickly transfer files using peer to peer networking. The company was founded in 2001 and went through a troubled period during the dot com crash days. Mark Cuban re capitalized and invested $1.7 million in the company in 2005.
RedSwoosh founder and CEO Travis Kalanick is better known for being a part of the founding team of Scour, the Michael Ovitz backed file sharing service that was sued out of business by the entertainment industry. RedSwoosh employees will become a part of Akamai´s engineering personnel in California.
This news tends to prove that even giants like Akamai with strong CDN networks cannot compete against p2p delivery networks. So if you cannot beat them, join (buy…) them !
To another extent, this news is very good and confirm the efforts from my company to evangelize P2P since the very beginning and provide P2P Content Delivery solutions to the top TV channels in France: peer-to-peer is now seriously considered as the main architecture when companies develop their online video distribution portal, while client-servers architecture are deprecated.
And of course it is not limited to video contents: you can use p2p content delivery networks for music, pictures, work documents, zip archives, programs …
Sebastien
http://www.1-click.com
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It also tends to prove that AKAMAI´s timing is excellent, they have just landed a partnership with CBS to become the back bone of their content distribution network. I bet this acquisition could come in handy in cases, where you might not need to stream content.
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