Open Internet Video: Miro Challenges Joost

Turn your computer into an internet TV with Miro - the free open-source video platform with the recently released version 1.0!



There are many ways to explain Miro:

• "A TiVo for the internet."
• "Turn your computer into a TV."
• "Simple, elegant internet video."
• "HD TV on your computer."

Miro is open-source, DRM-free, friendly to all content creators, connected to all the popular video sharing sites like YouTube and blip.tv, high definition, full of content, and BitTorrent-enabled. Miro challenges Joost which, on the other hand, is proprietary, DRM-protected, closed to video sharing sites and entirely streaming video.

Miro functions more like iTunes: download interesting videos from the internet or subscribe to 2500+ video RSS channels. Miro has build in BitTorrent support. Since videos must be downloaded, playback is not instant for now; but the videos load pretty quickly. Miro can play MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, Flash Video, and almost every other major video format.

Joost is like a better TV with instant play and interaction. It has 250+ commercial broadcast channels to choose from.

Miro and Joost have different strengths and focus. Users enjoy the competition of the maturing online video services.

Web Traffic Overtakes P2P

Peer-to-peer traffic dominated the Internet in the last 4 years. But web traffic has overtaken P2P for a while thanks to YouTube which represents nearly 10% of all traffic on the Net (that is ~1% attention of online users). Ellacoya estimates that presently, as a result of streaming audio and video in Web downloads, HTTP is 46% of all traffic on the network. P2P has a strong second place at 37% of total traffic. The rest:

• Newsgroups (9%)
• Non-HTTP video streaming (3%)
• Gaming (2%)
• VoIP (1%)

P2P could soon get a boost by Joost which can easily represent 2 GB of traffic per user per day.

2 Gigs Per User a Day

That is the estimated data traffic used by Joost for full screen video.

Does this fit into Your ISP's bandwidth policy? Better check it out.

Who is going to pay for this traffic? P2P distribution is radically cheaper than using your own datacenter - Joost bets on this.