Peer-to-peer streaming media delivery

Whatever definitions have been put upon it, peer-to-peer is an effective rallying cry for a new way of doing things. Streaming media delivery is particularly susceptible to a peer-to-peer architectural approach. Peer-to-peer systems have been shown to reduce the bandwidth cost and increase the scalability of on-demand and streaming content on the Internet. Similar techniques can be used to create a "virtual multicast", an application-layer implementation of the efficient subnet broadcast features of network-layer multicasting.