Inferno Nettverk A/S, OSLO, Norway
Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Inferno Nettverk A/S today publically announced the Shepherd project,
which has as a goal to work on scalable solutions for content
distribution.

Especially video streaming is a content distribution service for which
there now exist many popular sites. Compared to downloading files
there are however several challenges with video streaming. High
quality video requires large amounts of data to be transmitted at high
speed, and to support interactivity it is desirable to be able to
perform operations fast and with little latency. To achieve this
globally, for a large number of high quality video files, it quickly
becomes necessary to have a globally distributed content distribution
network (CDN) that hosts the files close to users. Building and
maintaining a CDN like this is not cheap.

At the same time, end-users have for many years used P2P-functionality
to essentially build global CDNs without buying or renting any
infrastructure. The Shepherd project aims to harness this same type of
functionality to allow content providers to create reliable and
scalable CDNs for legal content distribution, at low cost.

As an example of how this can be achieved, Inferno Nettverk today also
announced the first pre-release of the 'p2pd' CDN toolkit for
interactive Video-on-Demand streaming, p2pd version 0.90.0-pre1. The
'p2pd' server can be used to build both traditional provider hosted
CDNs to delivering files with HTTP, and CDNs that make use of
resources at client machines to stream files without having a large
CDN server infrastructure.

The 'p2pd' toolkit is free software available under a BSD-like
license, with source code available. For more information, see the
project web page: "http://www.inet.no/shepherd/"

The Shepherd project is managed and hosted by Inferno Nettverk, a
UNIX consulting company located in Oslo Research Park, Norway.

Inferno Nettverk specializes in services related to software
development and porting on UNIX/Linux and embedded/real-time
platforms, and has been a developer of open source software for many
years; the BSD licensed SOCKS implementation Dante was released by
Inferno Nettverk in 1998.

Please see "http://www.inet.no/en/services.html" for more
information about our services.

For more information about Inferno Nettverk, please see
"http://www.inet.no/en/inferno.html".