Google Inc., which recently bought popular YouTube.com in a deal valued at $1.65 billion, should keep a watchful eye on a technology prototype that will soon emerge from a Vanderbilt computer-science lab.
That's where Vanderbilt School of Engineering Professor Yi Cui is accelerating his push to develop a radically new approach to sharing multimedia content through a network of computers that would be provided by consumers of streaming digital content.
Cui's "peer-to-peer" (p2p) content-streaming model represents a dramatic break from the YouTube.com model of video presentation, which requires enormous capital and centralized computing capacity supporting a single venue. Cui's lower-cost technology could spawn hordes of video-sharing ventures.
Google acquired the capital-intensive YouTube.com recently in a transaction valued at $1.65 billion, suggesting the intensity of interest in shared video and other content.
Vanderbilt announced on Thursday that the National Science Foundation has awarded Cui the first of a series of grants that are expected to total about $400,000, enabling Cui to pursue development and eventual commercialization of his p2p technology.
Cui readily explained to NashvillePost.com, "The general idea of P2P streaming has existed for a while. China is taking the lead at this moment in terms of technological development and large-scale deployment. Within the U.S., a few number of my colleagues are digging this concept, but mostly on a theoretical level." He adds, "based on my knowledge, I'm probably the only one who is prototyping [P2P streaming]. "
Cui said that even though fruits of his work may be five years off, he is "very actively seeking partners, especially folks outside the [computer-science] domain, who share the same interests as mine. The real key factor to make p2p work is in fact non-technical: making it appealing to users..."
Cui, who not long ago was himself a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, says his team of graduate assistants will begin work on the technology this summer, building on Cui's earlier engineering research.
Cui's approach is designed to reduce the price of the multimedia streaming services, eliminate traffic bottlenecks that can emerge in networks of disparate peer computers, and enable multimedia streaming services to limit capital investment in computer servers.
Technology and Science |
Yi Cui |
YouTube.com |
National Science Foundation |
Media industry |
Google
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