CDN price war aside, P2P regains attention. Who is the driving force behind this?

Without talking about the price wars that have repeatedly broken out in the traditional CDN field, the market seems to have recently launched an invisible battle in the field of P2P+CDN technology.

First, recently, less than five months after merging with Youku CDN business, Alibaba Cloud claimed to have "released a big move", and announced the introduction of P2P technology in the CDN content distribution network field and the launch of the sub-product PCDN, which seemed to be another price cut; Coincidentally, Tencent Cloud then launched X-P2P, claiming to use the most complete "black technology" to create a new generation of intelligent streaming media distribution technology platform...

In the CDN field, which frequently creates the concepts of "disruption" and "revolution", the two major Internet giants have launched the so-called "new concept" of P2P technology. Has another battle for technology product upgrades officially begun? Has the model of creating new terms to attract the attention of market users been re-used by Internet manufacturers?

[[200924]]

The creation of Qvod P2P technology is inherently sharing-oriented

In terms of technology, concept and even market operation, "P2P" technology has actually existed for a long time in the development of China's Internet in recent years. In the era of Qvod, the technology developed to its peak - it once served 400 million Qvod users, created an industry record of carrying 80 million daily active users and more than 60 million concurrent online users. Of course, it does not rule out the possibility that P2P will become a technological hotspot at the moment when live broadcast and on-demand are popular. In Baidu Encyclopedia, P2P is explained as "peer-to-peer technology". For P2P, in this network technology full of sharing spirit, each node is a service provider and recipient, and each node shares part of its own hardware resources, including computing power, storage capacity, transmission capacity, etc.

In reality, a more popular explanation is: relying on the computing power and bandwidth of participants in the network, rather than concentrating all the reliance on a few servers. If you want to download a resource, you need to use your own computer to get it from the central server that provides the resource, but in the P2P mode, you can get it from any netizen's computer that has the resource, and the downloaded resource may also become the object of other netizens. It is no exaggeration to say that even a small broadband can watch high-definition video.

Around 2001, P2P traffic grew at an alarming rate. By 2004, it surpassed HTTP protocol applications and became the most common application on the Internet and the main consumer of bandwidth. In 2007, the growth of P2P traffic began to slow down. In 2016, live broadcasting exploded, capital entered the market, and nearly 300 companies entered the live broadcasting industry. In 2017, short videos overtook the competition and received financing one after another. The hot industry also led to fierce competition. The regulatory mechanism cooled the market, but the proportion of video transmission in Internet traffic has increased year by year, which has become an irreversible trend.

The diversification of video scenes has led to the rapid innovation of the video industry, which has put forward higher requirements for clarity and smooth experience. Bandwidth cost has become an obstacle that cannot be ignored. P2P has become a good way to share resources because of its better use of idle bandwidth, saving a lot of costs for enterprises. At the same time, since companies such as Yunfan Acceleration have already waded through the water on the road to commercialization, serving many new media and interactive live broadcast companies, solving customer pain points. Now it is also being fully valued by giants such as BAT and is being used as a weapon to compete in the industry. I have to sigh that P2P has regained its vitality!

Before 2015, the largest video-on-demand tool in China was undoubtedly Qvod. It is said that at its peak, it could handle more than 400 million daily active users and more than 60 million online users at the same time, which shows the strong technical strength of the Qvod technical team. At that time, even with the threats of QQ Video and Baofeng Video, it still controlled 80% of the web video on-demand market with its unique P2P technology and supported tens of thousands of individual webmasters. As for whether Qvod was guilty later, that is another matter, but it is certain that the P2P-based streaming media playback technology is innocent. As the founder of Qvod, Wang Xin, said, "Technology itself is not shameful", it not only revealed the winning magic weapon of Qvod's dominance in the video-on-demand world, but also lamented the helplessness of being unable to turn over under a piece of official document.

[[200926]]

No matter how much today's Internet companies boast about their excellent P2P technology, in the chaos of the industry, Qvod is still the legitimate king of P2P. The only one who can shake it is the technical team that created it.

The genes of Qvod have not been lost, and the disciple is better than the master

After Qvod was completely shut down, many netizens, out of their love for Qvod products, were also concerned about the future of Qvod employees and whether Qvod's excellent technology could be used more reasonably.

In 2015, a new CDN company founded by part of the technical team of Qvod began to surface. It was favored by investors at the beginning of its establishment and successfully completed the A round of financing. In the first half of 2016, it won the bid for Jiangsu Satellite TV's Lizhi.com live broadcast and Xinlan.com's full-service CDN project with the first place in technology, and solved technical problems for Jiangsu Satellite TV and Xinlan.com in the later service. In June 2017, it was successfully shortlisted for the Wasu Media CDN project, and in July it won the bid for Migu Video's 2017-2018 CDN project. This company is Yunfan Accelerator.

Based on P2P technology, Yunfan Accelerator is a company at the forefront of this field, building a low-cost, high-quality content distribution network service by tapping into and utilizing massive fragmented idle resources on the edge network.

[[200927]]

Someone in the industry once commented: "Qvod P2P was upgraded to YF-P2P. After nearly three years of market trials by Yunfan Accelerator and more than 10 years of accumulated technology, it started commercial services in the CDN+P2P model, breaking through the technical bottleneck in the streaming media field. It has become the best case of CDN+P2P."

In the process of commercialization, Yunfan Accelerator has taken another step forward while inheriting the genes of Qvod, and has successively launched P2P live broadcast solutions, P2P interactive live broadcast solutions, P2P on-demand solutions, P2P transmission solutions and P2P private cloud solutions. It fully supports various business scenarios of streaming media, large file on-demand, traditional live broadcast, interactive live broadcast such as games and shows, short videos, file downloads, etc. According to official data, YF-P2P live broadcast supports tens of millions of users online at the same time, and YF-P2P on-demand can carry hundreds of millions of users online. Since its commercialization in early 2015, it has helped customers accelerate P2P with an average of 50 million active users per day, with a service volume of over 3T. It is the most mature P2P technology in the market with the largest number of users and the longest commercial use time.

"In the past, P2P needed more than 10,000 users to reach a maximum output. Now Yunfan Accelerator can reach the maximum output with 500 users. It affects several dimensions, including user concentration, video popularity, latency requirements, and the network environment of participating users. Finally, we found that in terms of user experience protection technology, the sharing rate of large-scale P2P use is generally 60-80%, and the highest is more than 90%, which can reduce more than half of the bandwidth cost." Wang Xijie, founder and chief product architect of Yunfan Accelerator, former chief designer of Qvod system architecture and CTO, said in a previous media interview.

CDN+P2P gradually becomes the industry trend with complementary advantages

When live broadcast and on-demand video become heavy Internet applications that penetrate thousands of households, they will naturally represent the source of most of the traffic running on the Internet in the future. This figure shows the difference in the peak value of live broadcast and on-demand video services. Why are live broadcast and P2P integrated? Because the CDN of live broadcast has achieved better functions, performance, stability and responsiveness through the efforts of various manufacturers on the market. One-second delay, second opening, high quality and low lag have also been continuously solved. Why should they be combined?

It can be seen that the peak value of on-demand services is very balanced, while live broadcasts often have very high concurrency, which is basically concentrated in a certain instantaneous time period. Simply using it will bring high bandwidth costs.

For CDN, the core idea is to distribute content resources from the network center to the edge of the network closest to the user, and use load balancing technology to direct user access requests to the edge server, reducing the response time of user access and alleviating the pressure on the backbone network. In essence, CDN is an enhancement of the server-side capabilities in the c/s mode. System expansion requires continuous deployment of server nodes and must be able to meet the needs of peak traffic. However, due to the suddenness and unevenness of user access, it is difficult to improve the efficiency of the CDN system.

Traditional P2P is the P2SP architecture used by early BitTorrent and Qvod, and its biggest feature is high sharing rate and low availability. For example, in the Qvod era, the data sharing rate could reach 99%, but the quality could not be guaranteed.

A careful analysis shows that P2P technology has good scalability but cannot be effectively managed, while CDN technology is easy to manage and has good reliability but poor scalability. It can be said that CDN has advantages that P2P does not have, and P2P has advantages that CDN does not have. Combining the two technologies can build a network with better performance and reduce the overall cost of use. Yunfan Accelerator took the lead in realizing the technical implementation of CDN+P2P in 2015 and soon realized commercial application.

Wang Xijie, founder of Yunfan Accelerator, said at the APMCon 2016 technical conference in August 2016 that "CDN+P2P is not a simple superposition. We have improved the system's reliability, scalability and burst processing capabilities at the network level, reduced costs, and reduced cross-domain and cross-operator traffic issues. We have eliminated the problems of slow start-up and increased lag after traditional p2p is enabled, which reduce the user's playback experience. Compared with the use of CDN and P2P alone, the performance and stability are better."

It is understood that Alibaba Cloud's P2P technology originated from the acquisition and integration of Youku's own P2P, and commercialization has just begun; while Tencent Cloud's P2P technology comes from its acquired P2P startup team Moonlight Stone, and commercialization has been less than half a year. Yunfan has been accelerating the integration of CDN+P2P commercial services for nearly three years, serving hundreds of millions of terminal users, saving hundreds of millions of yuan in bandwidth costs for corporate customers every year, and solving the hotlink problem that plagues corporate operations and maintenance personnel, and supports more than 100G anti-attack capabilities and authentication encryption technology.

CDN+P2P has become one of the industry trends. The commercial use of YF-P2P has greatly changed many people's perception of P2P. They are willing to use P2P technology to improve network transmission efficiency, reduce costs, and improve user experience. Even companies in the radio and television field, which have always attached great importance to copyright and security, have changed their attitude towards P2P and have connected YF-P2P to all platforms. Even telecom operators, who used to have a negative attitude towards P2P, have quietly changed their attitude towards P2P.

Times are changing. Who can continue to innovate and keep up with market demand?

Although P2P is not a new technology, Yunfan Accelerator is the leader in this technology and has completed the research and development and application of delay-free P2P, which can be applied to interactive live broadcasts and can save customers more than 40% of bandwidth.

You should know that the development and application of zero-delay P2P is very beneficial to the commercial application of P2P. Because even though P2P applications were popular in the video trend, the high latency still made the live broadcast industry a little afraid of P2P technology, which led to the pressure of large traffic and bandwidth, and CDN was still chosen for network acceleration. The breakthrough of Yunfan Acceleration has given the video industry a reassurance in using P2P technology.

The industry-leading zero-delay P2P developed by Yunfan Accelerator can be applied to interactive live broadcast scenarios with high real-time requirements, achieving a live broadcast delay of less than 2s, maximizing bandwidth costs, and a sharing rate of more than 40%. The refined P4P function maximizes download speed, can refine P4P technology by region and operator, adopts an active discovery mechanism from user to target user, selects the best download source through algorithms, and improves performance by 200%-600%.

[[200930]]

At present, the technical principles and technical architecture of P2P are understood by more and more people, and its cost-saving feature is favored by the B-end market. Whether it is CDN manufacturers or new media OTT companies and online live broadcast companies, the combination of CDN and P2P has become a consensus, and the combination of the two is releasing huge technical dividends.

It is undeniable that the establishment of a business model is based on years of technological innovation and market exploration rather than the so-called "upgrade" of concepts. Products can be quickly copied and services can be imitated, but the awareness and ability of innovation are difficult to copy. Yunfan Accelerator's corporate culture of disruptive technological innovation and industry innovation is worth learning from other companies, and Yunfan Accelerator's case of insisting on innovation deserves our further attention.