I just want to say that I think that Kontiki could have been brilliant, but unfortunately I wouldn’t touch a service which utilises it – it seriously messed up my computer, made it load 4 times slower and would make my laptop frustrating and buggy instead of smooth. I think that had Kontiki invested into the service being “usable” and not causing problems then my belief is that the BBC and other providers would not have bothered changing over to another service.

I am currently downloading BBC programs again in the background!

Janko, This article doesn’t adequately or fairly represent Kontiki’s business. We have achieved significant success over the years, which is not always clear to those focused solely on the consumer media market. There is large demand for video delivery in the corporate enterprise market that can only be cost effectively addressed with P2P. The demand from this market is the primary driver of our growth, along with internet media services that have problems with scalability or delivery costs.

Here are some of our results so far, which may be interesting to technologists who follow this space:

1) Kontiki is deployed in over 170 countries, and we have been for years, with some of the largest and most well known companies in the world.

2) We are investing significantly in the growth of our business (mostly software engineering staff) and our customer’s success.

3) We are growing considerably, in # of customers, revenue and employees.

We will provide more details on the state of our business to the market in early 2009.

And lastly, the article mentioned that Kontiki is the “big loser” due to the BBC’s new iPlayer beta client, which currently does not use P2P. Quite the contrary, our work with the BBC over the last several years propelled us to the top of our market and helped legitimize secure/managed P2P media delivery. The PDF that you reference highlights several significant successes that Kontiki achieved with the iPlayer deployment. Any of our competitors would have jumped at the opportunity that we had with this project. We are privileged to have worked on this project over the last few years, and we look forward to working with the BBC going forward.

P2P is the future of mass content delivery for IP networks in general. For the internet it will be increasingly relevant as broadband video usage approaches broadcast TV viewing numbers. This may take some time … stay tuned!

What would be better if BBC opened up its content to folks outside UK. There are plenty of people in US, India, Australia who grew up on Brit-coms and other BBC specials, and are willing to pay a reasonable rate to get that content.

The million-$$$ question is: Will the BBC open it up for non-UK viewers?

If I ran the Beeb’s digital department, I’d know where to place the bets.