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A Little History
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology has been around for decades. In fact, the Internet was originally architected as a P2P network -- a network of computers connected to other computers. The birth of the Web introduced the central Web Server to the Internet's infrastructure as a solution for providing reliable, always on, always fast access to web sites and public content. This worked well for the most part in the Web's early years. However as more people came online and content became more popular, Web Servers became bottlenecks. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) came along to optimize content availability by distributing bandwidth and storage demand to thousands of "Edge" Servers as close as possible to consumers. This was a novel concept that still works exceptionally well for Web sites.
Fast Forward to Today ...
We live in a video-centric world. The billion-dollar businesses of TV and Film are thrusting themselves onto Web Servers to accommodate consumers seemingly insatiable demand for high quality video online. We now face a new challenge; As file sizes and consumer demand grows exponentially, the cost and capacity of central bandwidth and storage become gating, and often prohibitive, factors to providing the quality online media experience consumers demand. We've all experienced a choppy or unavailable video when it all of a sudden did what it was supposed to - get popular.
P2P - The Ultimate Edge
To maintain cost and ensure peak performance of high quality media online we need to take bandwidth and storage distribution to the next level, or rather back to our roots, and leverage the collective resources of consumer PCs and IP devices. This is the only way to ensure that the Internet's capacity can grow proportionally to demand. More consumers equal more resources. This is the promise of P2P
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Managed P2P for Commercial Media Delivery
Unlike most P2P platforms, Pando is not an open, fully decentralized P2P network. Pando is a managed, hybrid P2P content delivery platform designed to maintain central control of your content distribution at all times. All networking communications are routed via Pando's trackers and web services, giving you complete control of where and when your media is delivered. Consumers only supply bandwidth and storage to content that they have proactivaly consumed. Their machines are never used for anything else and only sparingly when needed.
Additionally, Pando works as an add-on to your existing CDN, not as a replacement. Your CDN is always the first and most reliable source of your content. Your consumers serve as an expanded content delivery network. As they demand more bandwidth, they also provide more of it. Demand and supply are directly proportional. As content becomes popular, more of it is served by your consumers ("Peer Cloud"). Less popular content wil continue to be served mainly by your central CDN Servers, which act as "supernodes" in your Peer Cloud, without any configuration or additional hardware.
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