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     This story was printed from CdrInfo.com,

     located at http://www.cdrinfo.com.

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P2P Internet traffic, despite having grown at a torrid pace for years, will grow almost 400% over the next 5 years, according to MultiMedia Intelligence.

Growing from 1.6 petabytes of Internet traffic per month in 2007, P2P Internet traffic will grow to almost 8 petabytes per month by 2012.

P2P data represents 44.0% of all consumer Internet traffic and 33.6% in North America. Although the base of legitimate P2P traffic is starting small, legitimate P2P traffic is expected to grow 10 times faster than illicit P2P traffic. Content owners increasingly see P2P as a cost-effective way to distribute digital entertainment services and content.

"P2P networking awareness grew from the illicit 'sharing' of music files, much to the chagrin of content holders," according to Frank Dickson, MultiMedia Intelligence?s Chief Research Officer. "Despite prevailing perceptions of P2P as synonymous with content piracy, P2P is emerging as viable means of distributing legitimate content."

MultiMedia Intelligence?s new research report, P2P Networking: Content?s "Bad Boy" Becomes Tomorrow's Distribution Channel, also found:

- P2P networking is dominated by music in terms of the number of files transferred. However, in bandwidth terms, growth of video is explosive. This growth is largely attributable to a transition to higher quality video and growing video demand in less developed markets.

- As the number legitimate P2P services grow, P2P is entering a second-generation evolution. Such next generation P2P services leverage traffic steering or management and include P4P, P2P caching and hybrid solutions, such as CDN/pseudo CDN services with P2P.