A step towards understanding Joost IPTV

Recently, peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming applications have drawn attention to both users and research community. The P2P approach for IPTV has the appealing feature of providing TV-like quality content distribution service (for both on-demand and live TV), which has been attracting a large number of users from across the globe. However, there is very little understanding about their network architecture and resource consumption. This work aims at having an in-depth understanding of Joost, a video-on-demand P2P system for distributing TV content, created by Skype and Kazaa founders. Results show that Joost relies on UDP for content delivery with an asymmetric bandwidth consumption of until 750 Kbps (download) and 480 Kbps (upload). We also evaluated the Joost control plane, which is mainly based on TCP. Along with other P2P IPTV technologies, such systems could have a great impact on network bandwidth utilization, even more than P2P file transfer ones.