NewTeeVee has a post about Pando, a large-file sharing application that is branching out into offering video streaming — something that makes perfect sense to me. If you’re already hosting files that people are sending through your servers because they are too big to email (David Pogue just wrote about discovering Pando in the New York Times — I guess he didn’t read my feature from awhile back that looked at different file-sending services), then why not do a little peer-to-peer streaming of video too?
Pando announced the new feature at the Supernova conference in the Valley. According to NewTeeVee, they will be offering ad insertion for publishers, usage tracking and an API for integrating the service into their existing products. One question that occurred to me: why isn’t BitTorrent, the P2P service that Bram Cohen developed, doing this already? They did just announce a deal to build BitTorrent into set-top boxes, but the streaming back-end service seems like a no-brainer to me.
And speaking of back-end services, my new friend Ethan Kaplan — who I met when he came to be on a panel at mesh — has a brief but er… colourful post about video-streaming apps such as Ustream and Blogtv.com and how they “bleed bandwidth out the arse.” Thanks for that image, Ethan.