Start-up EverNet to debut peer-to-peer software

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. - A start-up is promising to give users a way to reduce bandwidth costs associated with content delivery in the form of peer-to-peer software and services.

EverNet, which has been in stealth mode for almost two years, plans to announce its EverNet file delivery software this week. Basically EverNet uses a thin client that lets users on a corporate network - or on the Internet - act as content receivers and distributors. The company's software is designed to eliminate some of the content licensing headaches with which peer-to-peer file-sharing technology has battled, while delivering faster access to Webenabled content and significant bandwidth savings.

Motion picture distributor Filmspeed is seeing cost savings from EverNet. Filmspeed CEO Aron Campisano says EverNet's software has reduced his bandwidth costs sevenfold.

It would have cost the company about $1.50 every time a customer downloaded a typical video file using the unified model, whereby the file is received from a server on Filmspeed's content delivery network (CDN). EverNet has reduced that cost to 20 cents at the most.

"It allows any Web site to benefit from [peer to peer] with none of the downside, because the real advantage is bandwidth efficiency, especially in broadband environments," Campisano says.

Unlike Gnutella-type software, which lets users share files without considering the ownership of the content, EverNet's software incorporates what it calls master and distribution servers designed to let content owners control the delivery of their data. For example, a person downloading a video from a site must visit the content owner's site to get it. EverNet's distribution server, which can reside at a customer site or an EverNet data center, then delivers a thin-client agent to the user's computer. The agent lets that computer then receive specific content from the distribution server.

The software features intelligence that searches hosts for an entire file or pieces of it. By taking pieces of a file, rather than the entire file from a single host, an end user can get the file more quickly, and it places less strain on the host, whether it's an FTP site or another PC on the network. As more users act as hosts, delivery becomes faster, not slower, as can happen in traditional CDNs, Campisano explains. That's because traditional CDNs force users to rely on centralized servers and geographically distributed caches to deliver content. When many users request the same content, it creates the flash traffic floods that can bring down networks.

The secret sauce in EverNet's software recipe is mapping technology that resides on the content distribution server. That mapping technology keeps track of where files go, creating a huge grid of potential content hosters as more people download content. EverNet President Mike Helm claims that within 20 msec, the EverNet software will determine the 20 closest and fastest available hosts.

A potential gap in EverNet's technology, which Helm says the company is looking to solve, is that it can't let users access files that aren't Web-enabled.

EverNet will compete with the likes of OpenCola's Swarmcast distributed streaming technology and Kontiki's file-sharing service announced a few weeks ago, but those companies and products, like EverNet's, are also new and have yet to gain a wide audience.

Contact Senior Editor April Jacobs

Other recent articles by Jacobs

EverNet