P2P in Flash 10 Beta – a YouTube, Skype, and BitTorrent Killer

The inclusion of p2p in the Flash 10 beta threatens to bring down everyone from YouTube to Skype. Using P2P, Flash sites will be able to serve higher quality video than YouTube at a fraction of the cost. Meanwhile, the combination of the Speex audio codec and the Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) will enable sites to seamlessly integrate VoIP without requiring a Skype install. The impact of this change is hard to fathom. We’re talking about a fundamental shift in what is possible on the Internet, with Flash demolishing almost all barriers to integrating P2P on any site.

Hank Williams and Om Malik have discussed the potential for Flash 10 to be used for P2P CDNs, and they’re largely right on. The biggest problem I see with P2P CDNs is oddly latency, however. While P2P theoretically enables you to choose copies of content closer to you on the network, you still have to negotiate with a server somewhere to establish the connection (for traversing NATs), nullifying the P2P advantage unless you’re talking about really big files. As Hank identifies, the sites serving large files are the CDN’s best customers, so we are talking about a significant chunk of the CDN business up for grabs. That said, CDNs could easily start running Flash Media Servers themselves with integrated RTMFP. They’ve already addressed the server locality problem, and taking advantage of Flash deployments would simply be an optimization. Whether the CDNs will realize this shift has taken place before it’s too late is another question.

To me, the really vulnerable players are the video sites themselves and anyone in the client-side VoIP space. Writing a VoIP app is now equivalent to writing your own Flash video player. All the hard stuff is already done. Same with serving videos. You no longer have to worry about setting up an infinitely scalable server cluster — you just offload everything to Flash. No more heavy lifting and no more huge bandwidth bills. In the BitTorrent case, it’s mostly a matter of usability. As with Skype, you no longer need a separate install. Depending on what’s built in to the Flash Media Server, you also no longer need to worry about complicated changes on the server side, and downloads will happen right in the browser.

The stunning engineering behind all of this should be adequately noted. The Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) underlies all of these changes. On closer inspection, RTMFP appears to be the latest iteration of Matthew Kaufman and Michael Thornburgh’s Secure Media Flow Protocol (SMP) from Adobe’s 2006 acquisition of Amicima. Adobe appears to have acquired Amicima specifically to integrate SMP into Flash, now in the improved form of RTMFP. This is a very fast media transfer protocol built on UDP with IPSec-like security and congestion control built in. The strength of the protocol was clear to me when Matthew first posted his “preannouncement” on the p2p hackers list. Very shrewd move on Adobe’s part.

Are there any downsides? Well, RTMFP, is for now a closed if breathtakingly cool protocol, and it’s tied to Flash Media Server. That means Adobe holds all the cards, and this isn’t quite the open media platform to end all platforms. If they open up the protocol and open source implementations start emerging, however, the game’s over.

Not that I have much sympathy, but this will also shift a huge amount of traffic to ISPs, as ISPs effectively take the place of CDNs without getting paid for it. While Flash could implement the emerging P4P standards to limit the bleeding at the ISPs and to further improve performance, this will otherwise eventually result in higher bandwidth bills for consumers over the long term. No matter — I’d rather have us all pay a little more in exchange for dramatically increasing the numbers of people who can set up high bandwidth sites on the Internet. The free speech implications are too good to pass up.

Just to clear up some earlier confusion, Flash Beta 10 is not based on SIP or P2P-SIP in any way. Adobe’s SIP work has so far only seen the light of day in Adobe Pacifica, but not in the Flash Player.