I’ve been blogging on P2P online-video last month in a post that entitled, “Skype Founders Name Their New Startup Joost“, that post provides the background for a discussion of Joost’s name chosen strategy. You may wonder, Joost was not a popular topic when an Asian, especially the Chinese educated people when they talk about the online-TV, or videos. The main reason is in China, most people watch TV or videos through Xunlei (my another post) or PPStream, that I going to mention in this post.

PPStream is a widely popular peer-to-peer (P2P) Internet TV application in China and it employed a P2P-streaming technology that similarly to BitTorrent. As stated on its home page, when there are thousand of users in using the technology at one time, more stable the technology it is and the high-speed transfer of large data files over the PPStream would be allowed at that time. In addition, this application allowed anyone with a broadband connection to harness the concept of P2P and thereby accelerate the transfer speeds of TV broadcasts. As you can see on its web page, the TV channels are Chinese TV channels and mostly from China and Hong Kong.

PPStream has just release the latest stable version, i.e. 1.0.4.643, few features have been added to this version that helped the users in reducing the resources a PC might take when downloading the TV. They have added a mini window in the sidebar for the users when they’re watching two various channels on the PPStream. If you’re interested to use PPStream, you can download it by clicking here.

I observed that there is a growing trend of people in using the P2P technology in downloading data. On the business side, more and more new Internet startups are venture into this P2P things, and I guess they (companies) thought the world is awaiting a better way to distribute content. In fact, I quite worry for the side-effect of this emerging trend, particularly after I finished reading this article from Reuters that entitled, “Google and cable firms warn of risks from Web TV.”