— Walt Mossberg Likes Pando and So do We –-
Most of the popular video platforms like YouTube, Google, and Yahoo!, plus cool video publishing tools like Blip.TV and VideoEgg, stream video to computers as a Flash file. The file launches a nice video player on your Web browser. Flash has become truly ubiquitous, which is great; it means that virtually everyone can watch video without much hassle. However, there are limitations in quality and the ability to save files. Some experts predict that increased demand will make Flash video look worse and buffer more slowly.
Some smart vloggers like Andrew Baron of RocketBoom provide visitors with options to view and save some files of various size and formats. These vloggers use distribution protocols (including peer-to-peer) so the files download really fast. Distributing quality files is going to become increasingly important as video will inevitably be shown on big screen TV. So receiving high quality video clips will become an imperative. (Beet.TV is going HD this fall, I kid you not!)
We caught up with Robert Levitan, founder and CEO of Pando, a developer of software for sharing large size videos and other big files. It’s built on the BitTorrent open source platform. Earlier this month, Walt Mossberg gave the software a rave review. We’ve been using Pando to send around some of our big Beet.TV files – and it works really well. So, we decided to get the “download” on all of this from Robert. (Oh, and it was the neighborly thing to do as Pando and Beet.TV are in the very same landmark building in Manhattan’s groovy Flatiron District – so Robert just took an elevator to the Beet factory for his interview.)
— Andy Plesser
Peer-to-Peer Networks, BitTorrent, Downloading Video Clips Quickly, Large Video Files, Pando, Robert Levitan
