The Data Center in Your Living Room
Summary
European and Australian researchers want to build a giant P2P network on the basis of TV set-top boxes, Computerworld Australia reported this week. The so-called Nanodatacenters project is based on the idea that you don’t need giant data centers as long as you have increasingly powerful devices in millions of living rooms, capable of doing so much more than suffering through all those Law & Order re-runs. The project has already signed up a number of research partners, among them Israeli P2P caching startup Oversi and dutch electronics maker Thomson, which is active in the set-top box market. There’s apparently no broadcaster on board yet, but one would think that the BBC and other European networks are keeping an eye on the project, especially given the fact that they’ve been exploring similar P2P approaches. The BBC has been toying with the idea of letting everyone record over-the-air digital television and then swapping shows among viewers, eventually creating a decentralized Tivo that would offer on-demand access to thousands of hours of TV content.