Adobe bakes secure P2P into Flash

The P2P arms race is warming up, with Adobe adding secure P2P communications to its latest beta version of Flash, 10.1.

The addition of Adobe's closed RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol) gives developers the ability to stream data to endpoints without going through a central server. Flash has already had P2P support as part of Flash media server for a couple of years. The difference here is the RFTMP support, as implemented here by Adobe, supporting 1:1 or 1:many communications.

It allows rudimentary VOIP applications - although it obviously has other uses.

You can find an hour-long explanation on this by Adobe's Matthew Kaufman (who helped devise the dihydrogen monoxide hoax 20 years ago), here, or below.

Applications that could use this include group conferencing and gaming. But it's a natural transport for P2P radio, something we've covered many times over the years. The last attempt at legal, licensed P2P radio was Mercora, which abandoned subscription revenues for a web-tastic ad-supported revenue instead, changed its name to Social.fm and died an inevitable death not long afterwards.

Rendezvous and wireless networking allow every iPod to become a short-range radio station. Some things just take longer, I guess. ®