P2P could soon be coming to Youtube. While it wont make any difference to you as the viewer, the technology would mean that sites such as this one do not get overwhelmed when there is a sudden spike in traffic. A Chinese company, PP-Live has been experimenting with a P2P accelerator for Flash video streams. It requires you to install a small plugin for use.

PPVA, which is so far only available for Windows, is essentially a small plug-in that just sits in your task bar until it detects a Flash video stream. The app then finds out whether other PPVA users have accessed and cached the same clip; if that the case, it will request some of the data from them. A small status window shows where the data for each clip comes from, as well as other details.

This technique of course depends on how popular the video is, but as in the case of spikes - its usually the single video thats causing the crash. It would also allow huge savings in terms of bandwidth for the hosts. It could however cause havoc for Google who would like to know all the details about the videos being viewed.

PP-Live promises that at least the first few bytes would be downloaded from the primary server , giving the host the number of views. But it would not be sufficient for them to have detailed knowledge of how long a clip is watched or any such detailed analysis.

Only a Chinese language version of the plugin is so far available, but the English version should be out in about a month. It can also work well when videos are being downloaded too slowly because of a load on Youtubes servers. Its been found to work on Collegehumor as well. Check it out on PPLive

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