David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…You know us, Acquiredfm@gmail.com. It would be good to follow up on those. It may be out there somewhere. You know, there’s so much out there about Kazaa in the early days and Skype. This show was so much fun to research. So they sell the company but they keep the technology behind it, and that foreshadows what will happen in a few years with Skype. So they keep the technology and they start casting about it for, well, what else could we do with this incredible peer-to-peer file sharing technology that we developed? It might be worth a quick detour to just talk about how peer-to-peer technology and file sharing actually works at this point in time. So, the basic structure is that whoever is on the network is connected to everyone else on the network, and so, if you have a file or any kind of piece of data that you need to be transferring, rather than going and downloading that from one server in one location which is how traditionally the internet networking had worked, and actually, once again, worked mostly this way today. But this was before the “cloud” existed. You could just download pieces of that file from everybody else, every other node on the network. So, this is why on Napster and on Kazaa, you know, songs that were really popular were super, super fast to download because if thousands and thousands or millions of users all had that same file on their computers and they were connected to the network, you could just download little pieces of it from many thousands of different people instead of downloading, everybody going to one spot and downloading the whole file. And that’s so much more effective because, you know, then your bandwidth constrained by that one single server, in those days, you know, you had CDNs that were not as established and well-built out yet – the bandwidth issues and performance issues getting it from that one single server. So, suffice to say, peer-to-peer was this total revolution in maybe not the highest availability. There were kind of issues with reliability and some spottiness with it, but in a full distributed peer-to-peer network, amazing if your neighbor had something that you wanted, that you could just one-off grab from them.…

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