India Broadband Forum

newprouser

Watch a live video, share your PC with CNN

Many people who watched live streaming video of the inauguration of U.S. President Barack Obama on Jan. 20 may not realize that their PC was used to send the video to other PCs, too.

Clicking "yes" to a CNN.com dialog box installed a peer-to-peer (P2P) application that uses your Internet bandwidth rather than CNN's to send live video to other viewers.

The P2P application is called Octoshape Grid Delivery and is managed by Octoshape ApS, a company based in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Web surfers who visit CNN.com and select a live video stream for the first time see in their browsers a dialog box, shown in Figure 1, saying, "This site requires the Octoshape Grid Delivery enhancement for Adobe Flash Player." The dialog box doesn't appear when playing an ordinary video file, only when starting a live feed. (Feeds labeled LIVE typically appear in the upper-right corner of CNN.com's home page during business hours.)


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panchabhut

So u mean to say that CNN installs P2P software, which may be otherwise considered illegal, into our PCs even without our consent?

newprouser

First of all I'm not saying it. Second, yea they installing P2P software to remove load of their servers.

Archer

CNN people are smart to use P2P.

cool_techie_tvm

They are indeed asking for our consent. Remember the Yes/No window which comes? If we click Yes, we are consenting to the blah blah blah of CNN !!

saurav_k

does this happens with all videos of cnn or was it only with the obama inaugration video?

cool_techie_tvm

It happens only for the live videos broadcasted from CNN.

StarK

i don't mind this... they are saving on their server costs and in turn saving on the co2 released into the environment ...

and the feed which u wud b getting may also be coming from some other person's computer so u too are being benefitted, aren't you? and they are giving the yes/no choice too which has listed the software being installed.

but its bad since the more data transfer charges wud be applied to the user... so its a mixed bundle for users but good news for cnn (i'm sure they had nothing in mind about the environment.. just their costs)... they will never stop coming up with mischevious ideas to loot the end user.

saurav_k

yes .. i agree ... its pretty much justifiable provided the fact that they are asking for the user's choice before showing the videos.