The Beginning of the End for P2P?

Data from 2008 and 2009 indicates that while P2P (peer-to-peer) traffic still constitutes a substantial part of worldwide Internet traffic, it is actually in decline in terms of percentage. As a self-styled net neutrality advocate (actually just another avid BitTorrent user), personally I find the news appallingly obvious and appallingly shocking both at the same time.

Obvious because of the phenomenal rise of Flash, which makes YouTube and other video streaming sites possible.

Shocking because, well, I'm a P2P fan. But aside from my preferences, the recent trends show interesting patterns on how media companies/content producers are trying to adapt -- to use Aikido against the pirates. In short: Fight fire with fire.

Case-in-point: For the anime fansubbing community, video streaming started the love-hate relationship with Crunchyroll.

Before streaming became mainstream, fansubbed and "freely distributed" video files were only available through the seedy (excuse the pun) back-alleys of the Internet: IRC, direct download, and yes, P2P.

Now, with idiot-proof video streaming, more and more anime fans have switched from P2P to get their weekly fix of happy-time. Why bother with configuring your P2P client, or risking yourself to viruses, when you can just stream it? And if you got the bandwidth, video quality is no longer an issue.

Media companies saw this, and rather than fight the tide of millions of views per week and millions lost on lawsuits, some decided to license their content to the streaming sites for free advertising.

With the recent surrender of one large fansubber to Crunchyroll, one can see that it's a working strategy. And it's not confined to anime. New sites such as Hulu provide high-definition (720p or better) streaming of movies, TV shows, news broadcasts, etc. For free.

But fellow P2P fans need not despair.

Internet protocols come and go at the characteristic speed of Information Technology: somewhere between the lightspeed of electrons and the muck of human thought, there will always be another innovation/killer-app waiting to leap at us. And die.

But some do stay. Some have even predicted the fall of email and IM. Yes, they're now pathetic compared to social networking, but these are still useful protocols, and less bandwidth-consuming to boot. Important for a developing country still struggling to get its speed up.

So P2P will still have its uses (DVD-images for software, anyone?). And content producers gonna produce.