Peer To Peer File Sharing

Asked to describe radio, Albert Einstein answered: "The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat." To paraphrase Einstein, peer to peer (P2P) video file sharing is just like sharing videotapes, only without the videotape.

One Big Server

So you have a collection of brilliant videos and you want to share them and your directorial genius with the world. You can go about distributing them in two ways. One is to store them at central locations frequented by people who look at videos, like your local video store. In the computer world, we call this the "client/server" model. The video store is a "server" and the people who patronize it are "clients." There are advantages to this model: people know where to go to look for a video, the stock is consistent, easily predictable and you can ask a friendly store employee for help finding what you want. The downside of this is the limited hours of operation, their fees, and their selection of videos. For example, they might not want to carry the video of your trip to the zoo.

Sharing Servers