Forget multitouch: By far the most disruptive — and overlooked — feature of the Flash Player 10.1 beta that Adobe launched this week is the ability to transmit video via P2P multicast. In fact, Adobe built some enhanced P2P capabilities into both the new Flash Player and Air 2 beta that could be used to replicate BitTorrent functionality within Flash, build large-scale P2P groupware solutions that work right within the browser and stream video to millions of viewers without having to pay a fortune for bandwidth.

Adobe has been hinting at big plans for P2P ever since it bought a small P2P startup called amicima in early 2007. It made some of amicima’s technology available to developers about a year ago, but restricted it to small-scale use cases like P2P video conferencing or multiplayer games based on a few Flash players directly connected to each other via P2P. With Flash Player 10.1, Adobe appears ready to open the floodgates. CDNs and P2P video solutions providers would be well-advised to take notice.

Adobe’s P2P technology is based on its proprietary Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP), which was previously restricted to one-to-one connections. That means your Flash Player 10 could directly exchange data with another client, but not relay the data. Transmitting video to 10 other clients meant opening 10 connections to other Flash Players, a method that doesn’t scale very well.

All of that changed with 10.1, which supports true P2P multicast, making it possible to retransmit a video stream from a single source to a large number of viewers. And not just a few hundred viewers, or even thousands. “When we think of large, we think of millions,” amicima co-founder and Adobe P2P Project Lead Matthew Kaufmann said when he introduced the technology to developers at last month’s Adobe MAX event. In fact, he said, it should be capable of handing viewing audiences larger than that of the U.S. presidential inauguration, which has to date been the largest live-streaming event ever.

Kaufmann’s MAX presentation, which is available as an archived video online, is fairly technical, but it contains a few very interesting tidbits. Adobe put a lot of work into making Flash P2P both scalable and reliable, which is why it combined a number of cutting-edge video delivery mechanisms. Publishers can, for example, distribute a video stream via IPv6 multicast and back it up with P2P multicast, or they can source a stream from a server and then opt to distribute it via P2P. Kaufmann also claimed that the latency of Adobe’s P2P implementation is a lot lower than many of the existing P2P video solutions out there.

The whole experience should be pretty painless for the end user. “A permission dialog box will pop up for people using Flash Player 10.1 in the browser for P2Pmulticast,” I was told by Adobe’s Flash Media Server product manager, Kevin Towes.

But wait — Adobe’s got a few more P2P tricks up its sleeves. Developers will also be able to use Flash player 10.1 to build various other P2P applications right within the browser as well as within Air. One possible scenario mentioned includes object replication, more commonly known as file-sharing. “It’s a lot like BitTorrent”, explained Kaufmann, adding that one could use this to “write a crazy file-sharing application” or to “replicate how Groove worked in Actionscript.” Adding to that, Air 2 now supports writing your own file servers and similar stuff through a dedicated API.

We’ll probably still have to wait a few months before we can get a true grasp on what all of this is going to mean for online video delivery, but there’s obviously a potential for huge disruptions. For starters, P2P video companies might have a hard time convincing publishers to opt for their solution, if only for the fact that end users won’t have to install any additional plug-ins to access Flash P2P video streams. At the same time, P2P adoption could skyrocket, as live-streaming sites and others start to leverage Flash Player 10.1 to cut down on bandwidth costs.

So what’s in it for Adobe? Well, RTMFP is true P2P, but you still need a so-called rendezvous server to connect users to the P2P swarm before they can access the video. Adobe already offers this functionality though a hosted service called Stratus, which is capable of serving hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users. In the future, you’ll just use your own Flash Media Server as a rendezvous server. In other words: Adobe’s use of P2P may cut out a whole bunch of middlemen, but it still places the company itself squarely in the center of the online video world.

The Pirate Bay made headlines earlier this week with yet another dramatic announcement, this time that the notorious BitTorrent site’s tracker has been officially shut down. But the move won’t impact downloading, site admins explained on a blog. Trackers are no longer needed to facilitate BitTorrent transfers, the blog entry explained, because decentralized extensions of the P2P protocol are mature enough to pick up the tab. “It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date,” the blog proclaimed.

As always with announcements from the folks at The Pirate Bay, there’s a lot of self-serving smoke and mirrors, mixed with a good amount of hubris. However, the announcement does bring up an interesting question: Is BitTorrent really ready for a world without trackers? We talked to some of the major players to find out.

First, a quick primer so we all know what we’re talking about: When you download a file via BitTorrent today, you start off with a .torrent file that contains some meta data, including the address of at least one torrent tracker. These trackers facilitate your download by letting you know who else is sharing the file. The Pirate Bay’s tracker has been one of the biggest and, thus, most important of these facilitators, tracking by some estimates around 50 percent of the world’s BitTorrent traffic.

That’s a pretty impressive number, considering that the whole setup costs not much more than $3,000 per month, but it’s also an Achilles heel. After all, users solely relying on a tracker wouldn’t be able to exchange any files if the tracker became unavailable. That’s precisely why BitTorrent developers came up with a couple of decentralized approaches. Most BitTorrent clients now support a so-called Distributed Hash Table, or DHT.

A DHT is essentially a decentralized P2P network that stores all the information a tracker traditionally offers in the P2P cloud, making it possible to find users to download from even if the tracker server is offline. Most clients also support a feature called Peer Exchange (PEX) that’s meant to let peers talk to each other directly to take the load off a tracker server. The question is: Can DHT and PEX do all the heavy lifting and facilitate downloads for some 20 million simultaneous users without any tracker involved?

The first BitTorrent client that ever incorporated DHT was Vuze back in 2005 when it was still called Azureus, so I figured folks there might have an opinion on this. Vuze co-founder and CTO Olivier Chalouhi seemed bullish. “DHT works well as a technology, and is actually more scalable than tracker sites,” he told me. He cautioned, however, that very new files as well as rare files with few seeders would be served better by a tracker as opposed to a DHT-only environment.

Simon Morris from BitTorrent Inc. seemed a little more cautious. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some impact on performance,” he told me. “In theory DHT and PEX should be sufficient,” Morris explained, adding that the initial discovery of users to download from might be more reliable and robust if you can leverage a tracker server.

I also talked to an admin involved in running one of the big tracker servers that currently functions as the backbone of the BitTorrent universe. He sounded skeptical and said that he didn’t believe DHT to be scalable enough to completely take over.

To be honest, those are all just well-informed musings. We don’t really know what would happen if all of the world’s trackers were to be turned off tomorrow. What we do know is that BitTorrent wouldn’t work quite as seamlessly as it does now, if only for one reason: Bittorrent Inc. and Vuze actually use two different, incompatible DHT networks. This doesn’t matter as much when both clients are connected to the same tracker. However, in a tracker-less world, Vuze users wouldn’t be able to find users of BitTorrent’s client, and vice versa. Chalouhi told me that Vuze is currently working on integrating both DHTs to bridge those two worlds.

The good news is that trackers aren’t disappearing anytime soon. The Pirate Bay may have announced the retirement of its tracker this week, but the site’s tracker has actually been offline since early August, and other trackers have been more than capable of filling the void. In fact, tracker admins are working on new technology that would make their servers part of a federated network to prevent any interruption.

For end users, all of this means that little is changing. You’ll still use a BitTorrent site to search for content, and your client will most likely still connect to a tracker to download it. DHT has been around for years, and it may become more important over time. Some trackers may exchange data among themselves. The overall experience, however, will be pretty much the same. Maybe that’s what The Pirate Bay folks meant when they ended their sensationalistic announcement by proclaiming: “This is the future. And the present.” And the past, one might add.

Boxee CEO Avner Ronen stopped by our NewTeeVee Live conference last week to officially announce the first Boxee-branded hardware, a set-top box that will be available sometime next year. I interviewed Ronen after his keynote, and he gave me a few more details about both the box itself and the upcoming beta of Boxee’s software, which will be officially unveiled at an event in New York on Dec. 7th.

The upcoming beta is going to be much more media-centric and less application-focused than the current alpha version, which Ronen told me is largely to make it easier to find movies and TV content. Users will no longer have to remember who’s supplying Boxee with what kind of content, but will simply be able to browse a list of shows or search for specific titles.

Boxee’s current alpha version is really more of an app platform than a media center application on its own. Content from partners and third-party services like YouTube, CBS or Netflix is integrated through applications that can be combined to a kind of personal media buffet. However, users still have to dive into each application separately to find a particular video they’d want to watch, which is kind of a laborious experience if you don’t know whether the TV show you’re after is available on Netflix, Joost or through the Warner Bros. app.

The upcoming beta will change this by integrating all TV and movie content into a systemwide index that can be searched and used to program your queue. This new content repository will include your local library, so any shows you’ve downloaded via BitTorrent will appear right next to streaming versions available online. “We thought it’s very important, since we are bringing in more and more sources, that we make it easy for users to find stuff,” Ronen told me.

However, don’t expect Boxee to index each and every video on YouTube. It will focus squarely on professional, long-form content. “People on Boxee (spend) most of their time on TV shows and movies,” Ronen told me. To be precise, the average Boxee user watches six or seven TV show episodes a week, three movies and around eight clips from YouTube, Vimeo and similar sources.

When it came to the Boxee box, however, Ronen was a little more tight-lipped. The company hasn’t revealed the name of the CE maker that’s going to build this first device, but it has already hinted at further cooperations with other companies down the line, with the goal of bringing Boxee to a whole range of devices. So how much will you pay for the first incarnation of the Boxee box? That’s up to the CE partner, Ronen told me. He doesn’t think anyone could build and sell a Boxee device for less than $100 because the resource needs of the software, but added: “We definitely want to be under $200 if we can.”

Check out the full interview embedded above.

PBS isn’t just about Antique Roadshow anymore, PBS Interactive SVP Jason Seiken told the audience at our NewTeeVee Live conference today. But he’s the first to admit that PBS isn’t really the hippest brand around. The average age of PBS television viewers is “pushing 60,” he estimated. Consider that countless Elmo-addicted toddlers actually bring that age way down, and you start to understand that PBS has a bit of an age issue.

That’s a problem that the network wants to solve with an online video platform it launched this spring, and Seiken was happy to report that these efforts are starting to pay off. Forty-eight percent of PBS Video visitors are under 35, he said, and the youngsters seem to dig PBS programming as well. Viewers tune into a stream for 26 minutes on average, which is far longer than many commercial platforms. PBS is clocking 12 million uniques a month for its video site, and video views are growing 80 percent month to month.

One of the more interesting aspects of the site is that it’s also a content repository for PBS’ 357 local member stations. These stations can take shows like Frontline or NOVA and combine them on their own sites with small-town news and other local programming. PBS wants to make this relationship a two-way street next year with the launch of the site’s next version, which will automatically syndicate locally produced content and present it to a national audience.

So what’s the secret of the site’s success? Failure, actually. Seiken said that performance reviews at PBS Interactive now track the times an employee failed at their job, with the goal being not to punish, but to reward failed experiments. “Our engineers actually really love this,” said Seiken.

CNN and Facebook’s live coverage of the Obama inauguration was hailed by many, including our own Liz Gannes, as the future of social TV. CNN Worldwide VP of Digital Marketing and Development Andy Mitchell joined Randi Zuckerberg from Facebook’s marketing arm onstage at NewTeeVee Live in San Francisco today to share a little bit of the backstory of this cooperation.

The two tried to add social context to live news events during the months leading up to the election with an idea called “debating the debates.” Facebook had just launched its Facebook Connect platform, and both companies tried to have users watch the debates and exchange arguments online, signaling their allegiance for either candidate with a badge on their Facebook profile. Except that it didn’t work. Facebook Connect wasn’t ready to scale.

Then, the day after the election, Zuckerberg was approached by two engineers who told her about their election night experience. They had watched Obama win state after state via a live-stream in one window on their computer screens, and monitored their Facebook status updates in another window right next to it. The folks at Facebook immediately fell in love with the idea and sent a screenshot over to CNN. “We thought: Why isn’t everybody doing is? Let’s make it happen,” recalled Mitchell.

And make it happen they did. CNN clocked some 1.3 million live-streams and 20 million Facebook status updates during their inauguration coverage. These numbers were even more impressive because every TV network basically broadcasted the very same feed that day, as Zuckerberg reminded the audience. Behind the curtain, two war rooms at both companies continuously monitored the experience, connected via conference link. Mitchell didn’t share any details about the infrastructure used to serve all those streams, but he admitted that the challenges were scary. “We bought up all the bandwidth that was available,” he said.

So why doesn’t CNN complement all of its live coverage with Facebook Connect streams? Mitchell said that the network was still trying to figure out how to utilize this type of interaction for events that have smaller audiences, and he hinted at further integration in the future, albeit without providing any details. Zuckerberg added that the most impressive part of the cooperation has been how it immediately changed the expectation of what social TV has to look like. Before the inauguration, social meant sharing links or babbling in live chat rooms. Now, everyone from Justin.tv to the NBA integrates a Facebook Connect Live Stream.

Erik Flannigan, Executive Vice President of Digital Media at MTV Networks Entertainment Group, shared some interesting details at our NewTeeVee Live conference today about the way his networks are utilizing online video. Flannigan’s job is overseeing the web sites of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and these sites have been generating tons of video views for the network. Take Jon Stewart ripping into Fox News, for example. Clips like that receive 500,000 viewers from Huffington Post alone.

Flannigan doesn’t fear that people will shun their cable subscription for HuffPost’s embedded clips and ColbertNation streams. “Putting content online isn’t eating into your network ad sales”, he told the audience of NewTeeVee Live. Comedy Central’s online video traffic is always in sync with its network ratings. “That’s a good thing if you have hits and a bad thing if you don’t,” he added. Part of MTVN’s strategy for the future is to actually disintegrate these properties a little bit so online can have more a life of its own.

So what’s in store for monetizing Comedy Central and Spike TV content online? Flannigan said that he doesn’t see big changes ahead for some of it’s most popular shows. The network produces 160 episodes each year for both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and he doesn’t see anyone spend 99 cents for each episode anytime soon. In other words: Advertising is where it’s at, and the cake is only gonna get bigger.

Flannigan didn’t share any details about MTVN’s current online ad sales, but he said he sees the current state as a base line to grow on. he gave Hulu props for setting some of the standards in this space. However, Flannigan doesn’t seem to believe that Hulu will stay ad-only forever. His prognosis is that Hulu will eventually start offering premium subscriptions in one form or another, and that Disney will play a big role in establishing these new business models.

Finally, Flannigan shared a few thoughts about piracy, stating that 20 percent of all viewers will probably never pay, while another 20 percent would never pirate content. It would be up to the industry to win over the remaining 60 percent. That doesn’t mean release windows should be gotten rid of completely, but you’ll actually be getting HD and other extras that may be worthwhile to wait and pay.

Remember how iTunes popularized podcasts? The same could soon happen to TV torrenting, thanks to a new BitTorrent application called TVTrigger. Windows-only TVTrigger is like an iTunes for your torrent downloads. It sits on your desktop, giving you access to a programming guide with a few thousand TV shows, complete with torrent links to download each one of them.

Sounds legally questionable? It probably is in the U.S., but that doesn’t bother TVTrigger’s Egypt-based makers, who claim that BitTorrent is legal in their country and they don’t have access to Hulu.com.

TVTrigger offers listings and descriptions for around 3,000 TV shows, most of which air in the U.S. Users can browse the shows by air date, alphabet or genre. Each show features a lot of background information including cast and crew and an episode list. There’s an integrated audio player to listen to the show’s theme song, a link to the show’s official web site, and an affiliate link for Amazon.com.

And then there’s the whole BitTorrent side. TVTrigger searches four BitTorrent indexing sites for torrents of a selected episode, and users can start downloading right within TVTrigger. Alternatively, TVTrigger can hand over that torrent link to another BitTorrent client to do the heavy lifting. TVTrigger also relies on external applications to play back the downloaded video files.

One of the more interesting features is that users can auto-download new episodes of their favorite TV shows, which makes it possible to set up TiVo-like season passes for BitTorrent downloads. Features like these are a direct result of programmers’ own downloading experiences, Mohamed Bedda of 8YSeven, which makes TVTrigger, told me. “As TV users, we used to check out a show’s info from one place, see the TV listings from another, check out what new episodes we missed, search for a torrent, and download, all from different sources,” he said.

TVTrigger aims to unite all those things in one application, and it does its job surprisingly well for a newcomer. Granted, Hulu users may still find on-demand streaming to be easier, but that’s a question of perspective — and access. Outside the U.S., people don’t have anything like Hulu at their disposal. Still, the folks at 8YSeven are already thinking about adding streaming sources as well. “We do not limit ourselves to torrents; we just see it’s the easiest and most reliable way now,” Bedda told me.

Of course, downloading TV shows with an application like this isn’t recommended, at least if you want to stay on the right side of U.S. copyright law. But U.S. copyright law isn’t universal, and some of the countries with laxer downloading rules don’t have any other way to legally watch U.S. television online.

UK-based P2P video platform VODO published its second feature film on dozens of file-sharing sites Thursday, hoping that worldwide exposure will bring in donations, subscriptions and traditional distribution deals. David Miller’s documentary In Guantanamo, which is the result of a press tour of the controversial detention facility, has been downloaded around 15,000 times within the first 24 hours, according toVODO founder Jamie King.

The site’s first feature, Us Now, got downloaded around 250,000 times since its release in mid-October. Part of the volume is due to VODO’s relationships with a number of well-known BitTorrrent sites, with Isohunt and The Pirate Bay currently featuring In Guantanamo on their front pages. VODO hasn’t been quite as successful in making money from these downloads, but King hopes that a combination of one-off donations and a subscription level for documentary geeks and movie buffs will help eventually make the site sustainable and provide an additional revenue stream for filmmakers.

VODO is short for voluntary donations, and King is no newcomer to the idea of giving content away in exchange for contributions from viewers. He is the maker of the pro-piracy documentaries Steal this Film and Steal this Film 2, both of which were released for free online. Viewers donated around $30,000 since the first part of Steal This Film got released three years ago.

The new site’s first documentary Us Now hasn’t been quite as successful yet. The film has brought in less than $1,000 in donations since its release in October, according to King. “If we can get it closer to $5,000 we’ll be doing well,” he told me, adding that he views donations as only one piece of the puzzle for filmmakers. King was able to sell his documentaries to several TV networks around the globe in part because the films were so successful online, and he hopes that others can follow in his footsteps.

VODO passes 100 percent of its donations directly onto filmmakers, but it also asks viewers to become paying members of the site. VODO supporters who pay around $5 a month get access to a pool of movies that are considered for distribution. “We’ve got (around) 15 films we’re considering right now,” explained King. Paying supporters can vote on which of these movies will get picked up for P2P distribution, and VODO also wants to organize online events with the filmmakers for these members. So far, around 50 people have signed up for this online film club. VODO hopes to grow this number to at least 1,500 in the near future.

King and his collaborators have received grants from the Channel 4 British Documentary Film Foundation, the Arts Council England and the Emerald Fund to start VODO , with the total funding being just shy of $250,000. King isn’t sure whether VODO will sign up corporate sponsors in the future. Right now, the funding is enough to keep the site and its development going for a year, and filmmakers seem to be eager to sign up. King told me that he has another dozen movies in the queue, and is talking to a couple dozen more filmmakers who want to get their movies out to P2P sites. “We’re building the new world here,” he said.

Chinese P2P startup Xunlei has sued its competitor Sohu for copyright infringement, according to the Shenzen Daily. Xunlei is alleging that Sohu’s search engine, Sogou, is infringing on copyrights related to Xunlei’s P2P software as well as its own search engine, Gougou.com. Sohu had previously filed its own copyright infringement lawsuits against Xunlei and other Chinese P2P vendors.

China has long been a P2P video wunderkind of sorts. Efforts to establish P2P-based consumer video platforms like Joost and Babelgum have largely failed in the U.S. and Europe, but similar offerings attract millions of users in China. However, the Chinese market is saturated with literally dozens of video vendors, and efforts to grow their business beyond the PC have stalled due to strict government licensing requirements.

Xunlei is a popular Chinese P2P client that combines BitTorrent with web-based downloads. The company’s Gougou.com search engine links to TV shows and movies hosted on various ftp servers and web sites. Users can download these files and automatically accelerate their downloads through Xunlei’s P2P functionality. Gougou obfuscates these links in order to get users to access the content with its own client and sign up for its premium services, which include remote downloading to Xunlei’s servers.

However, that didn’t stop Sohu from allegedly crawling these sites as well and publishing the direct download links without any Xunlei-specific code. Xunlei wasn’t too happy about that and decided to sue last week. Some reports suggest the lawsuits include complaints about cracked versions of Xunlei appearing in Sohu search results. Sohu previously sued Xunlei for broadcasting a TV series that the company had exclusive online rights for, and it recently announced further lawsuits against Xunlei and other competitors under the helm of a newly formed “Online Video Copyright Union.”

You know the fight for market share is getting ugly when online video companies do the dirty work for rights holders and sue each other for copyright infringement. The irony of these lawsuits is that much of the content indexed by both search engines clearly isn’t licensed to begin with. We asked both companies for their side of the story, but haven’t heard back from Xunlei, and just got a brief “no comment” from Sohu.

The lawsuits shouldn’t really surprise anyone who has been following the Chinese online video industry. The country is home to a number of large P2P video platforms as well as YouTube-like sites. P2P streaming service PPLive, for example, touts up to 30 million active viewers per month, and YouTube-like Youku boasts 140 million visitors per month. Both compete with at least a handful of similar services, many of which also have an impressive user base. There isn’t one clear market leader like YouTube in the U.S., and Chinese online video business models still seem to be in a flux.

At the same time, it’s been getting harder for Chinese video ventures to grow their market beyond the PC audience. PPStream and Xunlei have tried to get their platforms on set-top boxes and connected TV sets, but those efforts have stalled because of the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. The government agency views set-top box offerings as equal to over-the-air or cable television programming, which means that online video startups would need to get a special Internet TV license. That hurdle seems to be so high that a Chinese TV set manufacturer actually canceled plans to include PPStream in one of its connected TV sets in September.

One in three Internet users in the UK is watching TV online, according to a new study by the British media regulation authority Ofcom. This trend seems to be largely driven by the BBC’s iPlayer, which is used by 27 percent of the country’s online population. However, traditional TV viewing still plays a huge role, and time-shifting through DVRs is growing quickly.

Compare those data points to other countries in Europe, and you’ll get a significantly different picture. Online TV platforms are far less developed in Germany, for example, a country that just like the UK has a strong online population. DVRs are also much more popular in the UK than elsewhere. Still, there’s one thing we all seem to agree on, no matter where we are: We do love our TV.

We’re the first ones to admit that NewTeeVee can be a little U.S.-centric in its coverage of the online video world. That’s why we’re happy when institutions like Ofcom crank out studies like the UK Adults’ Media Literacy 2009 Interim Report, which can be downloaded in full from Ofcom’s web site (PDF). The report is based on survey data from this spring, and Ofcom is currently in the process of getting additional data for a complete 2009 report to be published early next year.

The data currently available is already pretty revealing: 29 percent of all online Brits watch TV on the Internet, and almost all of those (27 percent, to be precise) use the BBC’s iPlayer. Around 9 percent watch TV shows or download movies from other web sites. More than 40 percent of users between the ages of 16 and 34 watch TV or movies online.

Compare those numbers with a country that doesn’t have the iPlayer, and you’ll see the real impact the BBC’s online programming is having: TV networks in Germany have only recently begun to publish full-length shows on the web, and there isn’t any single popular platform comparable to either Hulu in the U.S. or the iPlayer in the UK. Around 62 percent of all German Internet users are watching online video, but only around 4 percent regularly, while some 17 percent occasionally frequent the media sites set up by TV networks, according to a study published by the German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF (Full disclosure: I occasionally contribute to programming aired by ZDF.) earlier this year. Most users instead go to video portals like YouTube or Germany’s Sevenload, presumably to watch short clips of their favorite shows that were uploaded by other users.

The gap between the UK and continental Europe seems to be even bigger when it comes to DVR use. Ofcom’s report reveals that 34 percent of UK households now own a TiVo-like device. Two years ago, roughly 23 percent of all Brits were able to time-shift TV content. In Germany, less than 4 percent of all households owned a DVR in 2008, according to a study published late last year.

There is, however, one thing that unites Brits and Krauts: TV is still the most popular medium, despite heavy Internet usage in both countries. German Internet users spend 70 minutes every day online, but 228 minutes in front of the TV. And 51 percent of all Brits say they would miss TV the most if it was taken away from them; only 15 percent would miss the Internet more than any other medium. Interestingly enough, TV got even more popular over recent years: In 2005, it was only mentioned by 44 percent of all UK respondents as the medium to be missed the most.

A criminal investigation has been launched against senior executives of YouTube and parent company Google in Hamburg, Germany, over allegations of copyright infringement, according to media reports from that country. The case started after a complaint by German music rights holders; Hamburg’s prosecutor has formally requested assistance from U.S. colleagues to compel YouTube to produce log files identifying who uploaded as well as who viewed 500 specific videos.

It’s unclear if the investigation will ever result in an actual court case. German prosecutors routinely throw out criminal investigations against copyright infringement, leaving it up to the parties involved to pursue civil lawsuits or settle out of court. The case does, however, once again demonstrate that Viacom’s massive one billion-dollar lawsuit isn’t the only copyright dispute Google has to tackle. There are regularly lawsuits all around the globe accusing YouTube and Google as running a worldwide video platform. Indeed, at a time when fragmented rights and universal access continue to collide, not irking rights holders seems impossible.

The current investigation started as the result of a formal complaint by Hamburg-based lawyer Jens Schippmann, who represents 25 German musicians, producers and music publishers. Schippmann sued Google in civil court earlier this year, alleging that videos of his clients have been viewed more that 125 million times without any compensation. Schippmann now alleges that Google didn’t respond to requests to take down more that 8,000 videos and that his clients were denied access to the company’s Content ID Program. He also claimed that users would utilize YouTube as a kind of “covert file-sharing platform,” tagging his clients videos with keywords like “album quality” to encourage downloading.

Google strongly objected to these claims, according to a report by German IT news site Netzwelt.de. German Google spokesperson Henning Dorstewitz rejected the idea that executives or other employees of Google or YouTube were committing criminal acts of infringement. “We cooperate with thousands of rights holders across the globe,” Dorstewitz told Netzwelt.

He was undoubtedly referring to Google’s Content ID system, which is able to identity songs used in videos based on audio fingerprinting technologies, among other things. Google recently told us that more than a thousand rights holders have utilized Content ID to date, with the total number of reference files used to identify rights holders’ works now being north of a million. Content ID makes it possible to flag certain videos or songs used in videos for takedown, but rights holders can also elect to keep these videos up and instead monetize them through advertising. These decisions can be country-specific, making it possible, for example, to monetize content in the U.S. and take it down in other countries.

Content ID hasn’t stopped rights holders around the globe from crossing swords with Google. Part of the problem is that music rights are extraordinarily complicated, with many different parties owning rights to the same song based on the type of use as well as the territory. One example: Licensing talks between the German music rights group GEMA and YouTube broke down this spring. German YouTube users have not only had to go without countless videos featuring songs licensed by GEMA ever since, but they won’t be able to watch U2’s YouTube concert that will be streamed live by the site this Sunday, either.

However, the current criminal investigation wouldn’t go away even if Google and GEMA made up tomorrow. The rights holders represented by Schippmann only signed over certain rights to GEMA and instead decided to go after Google by themselves.

Network security vendor Arbor Networks has been drumming up publicity for its upcoming Internet Observatory Report this week. One of the widely reported tidbits is that P2P has “declined dramatically in the last two years,” and that it has been replaced by YouTube and other streaming video sites. Wired News took away from the report that “P2P is dead,” and ReadWriteWeb ran with the title: “So long, P2P, Hello Streaming Media.”

Findings like these are puzzling to anyone who’s been frequenting any of the big torrent sites lately. File sharers still seem to be as busy as ever, exchanging pretty much every movie and TV show episode you could think of. And didn’t Cisco just recently forecast that global P2P traffic will keep growing in years to come? Turns out, it’s all about how you interpret the numbers.

The Internet Observatory Report, which is scheduled to be presented at the North American Network Operators’ Group Meeting in Michigan on Monday, is the result of two years of research by Arbor Networks, the University of Michigan and Merit Network. It’s based on traffic analysis from 110 participating ISPs, and the total amount of data analyzed was more than 256 exabytes, according to an Arbor Networks press release. Yeah, I had to look it up as well: An exabyte is one billion gigabytes.

One conclusion of the analysis of all this data is that P2P isn’t as dominant as it used to be. In 2007, it accounted for 40 percent of all Internet traffic, according to Arbor. Fast-forward two years, and it’s down to 18 percent. However, that doesn’t exactly mean that P2P is dead. It’s just not growing as fast as web-based video streaming, which has been largely responsible for a huge overall growth of net traffic. In other words: A smaller piece of a much larger pie can still be a whole lot of pie.

I asked Arbor Networks Chief Scientist Craig Labovitz about this, and his answer confirmed my hunch that the picture looks very different when it comes to absolute numbers: “We found overall average Internet traffic growing globally at 35-45 percent annually,” he told me. “So the decline in P2P ‘market share’ is likely as much that P2P is not keeping pace with overall Internet growth as a decline in P2P traffic volumes.” Labovitz said that Arbor doesn’t feel as comfortable publishing absolute numbers of P2P traffic because of issues like encryption, but he still suspects that P2P may be dropping slightly even in those terms.

So what does all of this mean? P2P is less dominant than two years ago because of the explosion of web video, but it’s hard to figure out how that relates to media consumption habits. Some users may give up on BitTorrent because of Hulu.com. Others may still download TV shows, but watch disproportionally more web-exclusive and user-generated content on YouTube. Either way, P2P is still very much alive.

The folks behind the open-source video player Miro today launched VideoWTF, a site that aims to be something like a Yahoo Answers for the production side of all things newteevee. Don’t know what kind of camera to get? Unsure about whether to shoot interlaced or progressive? Looking for a place to chime in on the pros and cons of various MP4 flavors? Then VideoWTF is definitely worth checking out.

The site is built on Stack Overflow, an open-source CMS that combines Wiki-like functionality with a collaborative Q&A approach. In other words, anyone can post questions, provide answers, and vote on both — and everything can be edited to perfection. Stack Overflow has become really popular with programmers ever since it launched about a year ago, and the Miro folks believe that this format will be useful to video makers as well.

To be sure, there’s hardly a shortage of places to go and geek out about the technical aspects of making video. Any Google search about specific formats or gear will lead you to dozens of specialized forum posts from sites like Doom9.org or DVCreators.net. However, chances are that the answer you’re looking for is hidden somewhere in a passionate back-and-forth that spreads over 40 forum pages. And usually the answer is from 1999, specific to an application or camera that hasn’t been available for ages. It’s a frustrating experience. Trust us, we’ve been there.

VideoWTF tries to avoid this by relying on Stack Overflow, which features more of a Wiki-like approach to problem solving. Questions as well as answers can be edited, and ideally, the best answer gets voted up, so you won’t have to read through dozens of replies before finding something useful. Stack Overflow is developed by Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame and Coding Horror blogger Jeff Atwood. “They just started making it available as a service to other organizations for other topics, so we jumped at the chance to create a similar resource for video creators,” explained Nicholas Reville from the Participatory Culture Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Miro.

The site is still in its infancy and currently only features about a dozen or so questions, ranging from licensing options for documentaries to the best encoding settings for iPhone videos to the pros and cons of wireless microphones. Reville hopes VideoWTF will eventually grow into a strong community for online video makers. He said the site aims to be complementary to Make Internet TV, a site launched about two years ago by the same team that features text and video how-tos.

Bandwidth-conscious broadcasters have a new way to distribute their live video streams. A group of Uruguay-based P2P researchers recently released the first English-language version of their open-source P2P streaming application, GoalBit. The application, which is based on a BitTorrent-like architecture, aims to compete with P2P streaming services like PPLive and PPStream by giving anyone looking to distribute their own live video programming a way to do so.

GoalBit, which is available for Windows and Linux, currently features just a handful of Uruguay’s TV networks streaming at fairly low bitrates. But the service looks promising nonetheless, and its extensive documentation could be intriguing to anyone interested in P2P streaming.

GoalBit uses a hybrid approach that combines the best of the BitTorrent world, with features from the likes of P2P networks such as Gnutella and KaZaA’s FastTrack network. Its network features a tracker similar to the one used by BitTorrent clients, but it also makes use of so-called super-peers. These are computers with fat pipes that help to distribute the initial signal until it trickles down to users with ordinary DSL connections and limited upload speeds. Super-peers can be run either by the broadcasters themselves, or self-selected based on the connectivity of the individual end user. The idea of this multilayer approach is to prevent too many direct connections to the broadcaster while at the same time making the system scalable.

Another interesting aspect of GoalBit is that channel lists are distributed in the form of small files similar to .torrent files in the world of BitTorrent. Broadcasters simply have to create such a file with the help of the GoalBit client, announce their stream with a GoalBit tracker and upload the file to a web server — and they’re ready to stream to the world. Well, that’s the theory anyway. The developers of GoalBit state that this so-called “Broadcast Yourself” functionality is still experimental, and I haven’t actually tested it myself.

GoalBit is competing with a wide array of P2P streaming applications, most of which are proprietary. Particularly successful examples are PPLive, which claims up to 30 million active users per month, and PPStream, which boasted 1 billion video viewing hours per month a good year ago. Another player in the open-source P2P streaming field is P2P Next, a European project funded with 14 million euros ($20.4 million) by the European Union. P2P Next demonstrated a streaming client dubbed SwarmPlayer in the summer of 2008 and has since been busy developing and testing a set-top-box implementation.

Companies like PPLIve and PPStream cater primarily to users in China as well as Chinese-speaking audiences worldwide, but P2P streaming apps have also always been popular with sports fans looking for their latest soccer or Olympics fix — a fact that was clearly not lost on the GoalBit makers, as is evidenced by the choice of name.

The House Energy & Commerce Committee is scheduled to mark up tomorrow a bill dubbed the Informed P2P User Act (H.R. 1319) that aims to prevent accidental file-sharing by mandating the display of clear warnings during the installation and usage of P2P software. Critics, however, fear that the final bill might end up going much further, regulating FTP clients, web browsers and even complete operating systems.

The bill could also have implications for anyone trying to leverage P2P for video distribution via solutions like the Octoshape Flash plug-in that was used by CNN.com to handle the Obama inauguration livestream traffic. The irony of the whole controversy is that much of the support for H.R. 1319 has been motivated by an almost religious disdain for just one file-sharing program in particular.

The Informed P2P User Act, which was introduced by Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) in March, is supposed to prevent so-called inadvertent file-sharing, which has in the past resulted in the leaking of Social Security numbers, tax returns and even classified government documents. Inadvertent file-sharing is usually caused by users accidentally sharing their documents folder or even their entire hard disk with everyone connected to the same P2P network. The bill would force makers of P2P software to inform users about its file-sharing capabilities and get their informed consent before installing the software in question. Users would also have to acknowledge that they know what they’re about to do before sharing any file. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

It would be, except the bill defines P2P applications as anything that “designate(s) files available for transmission to another computer” as well as transmits and receives files. Of course, the same can be said for FTP clients — or your browser, for that matter. “There’s little in this definition that limits the scope to an actual p2p application,” wrote Alex Curtis from Public Knowledge, and Declan McCullagh from CNet agreed: “Every copy of Windows, GNU/Linux, and Mac OS X sold in recent memory includes a command-line FTP client fitting that definition.” And the current definition would also affect P2P streaming solutions and BitTorrent clients, even though there is virtually no risk that anyone would share his Social Security number through downloading a torrent or accessing a P2P video stream.

One of the most vocal supporters of the bill is the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Thomas Snydor, who’s testified before Congress numerous times about the subject. At the center of all of his testimonies is one single file-sharing client: LimeWire. Snydor alleges that the application has been intentionally designed to “prey on the weak” by tricking people into unknowingly sharing files.

He has repeatedly singled out functions of LimeWire that could lead to accidental file-sharing, claiming in his most recent testimony (PDF) that he was able to simulate the accidental sharing of almost 17,000 sensitive files “just by installing LimeWire 5.2.8.” Snydor had to backtrack later and admit that this was only possible because he prepared the PC by installing a previous version of LimeWire, enabling document sharing (an option hidden in a sub-menu that’s labeled with a clear warning message and takes six clicks to activate) and then uninstalling the earlier version before once again installing the client. LimeWire chairman Mark Gorton called the result of these actions in an interview with ComputerWeek “a highly misleading picture of reality.”

Of course, one might be able to argue that LimeWire could be doing a better job to prevent even such highly unlikely cases of accidental file-sharing. But do we really need a new bill for that? Even Thomas Snydor has difficulties justifying one. As he said in his most recent testimony, “[E]xisting laws already provide the authority needed to send a blunt and powerful message that would deter distributors of piracy-adapted file-sharing programs from causing further inadvertent sharing.”

It’s that time of the year again: TV networks are debuting new shows and hoping that established names will bring in huge ratings. These numbers became even more important than usual after Techcrunch published an internal email of CBS Interactive CEO Quincy Smith this week. Smith had forwarded to his staff a Contentinople article in which TV exes railed against Hulu, and suggested: “We should think about how hard it would be to prove that some ratings declines are a result of reckless hulu streams…”

CBS has been having a couple of good nights lately, with shows such as The Mentalist holding up against audience darlings like Grey’s Anatomy, and new shows like NCIS Los Angeles pulling in record audiences. But is that really because CBS is shunning Hulu and only posting full episodes of some of its shows to its own sites, CBS.com and TV.com? Is free online TV to blame for bad network TV premiere ratings? Take a look at fall TV shows popping up on torrent sites, and you’re gonna see a different picture.

TV schedules are a little bit like black magic, even in the age of TiVo and Hulu. Take CBS’s The Mentalist . The network moved the show to a new spot this season — Thursday nights at 10 p.m., where it will compete with ABC’s Private Practice once that show comes back on the air in October. The new spot probably could have given The Mentalist’s season premiere a solid lead, if it wasn’t for the fact that ABC premiered Grey’s Anatomy at the same time this week. Still, The Mentalist got 14.3 million viewers, which is only slightly less than last year’s series premiere and 26 percent above the numbers that CBS got for the same spot last year.

Would The Mentalist have fared any worse if the show premiere had been on Hulu.com as well, or on any of CBS’s web properties, for that matter? A look at online piracy indicates that online availability wouldn’t have done much harm. Case in point: The premiere episode of The Mentalist popped up on torrent sites before it aired on CBS this year. CTV premiered the show early in Canada, and P2P fans quickly redistributed a recording that has since attracted tens of thousands of downloads.

Other networks’ success stories don’t appear to be influenced by free online offerings either. The season premiere of FlashForward was watched by 12.5 million viewers, despite competing with CBS’s Survivor, which attracted 11.6 million. FlashForward is not only available in full on Hulu.com, but the show is also a big hit on torrrent sites like The Pirate Bay, where the premiere episode currently ranks as the third most-downloaded TV show.

This is not to say that free TV content online can’t have an on impact network ratings. Fox’s debuted its new teen comedy Glee last spring, and the season’s pilot has been available on torrent sites ever since. Maybe it wasn’t a big surprise that only 4.3 million viewers tuned in when Fox showed the director’s cut of that episode earlier this month. Still, the show has been having pretty solid ratings ever since and has actually impressed with a sizable audience share of 18-34-year-olds. You know, the ones that tend to download stuff and browse reckless sites like Hulu all day.