TEL AVIV, ISRAEL - December 19, 2010 - VOD usage growth of 50% in 2010 and showing no sign of slowing threatens to exceed network capacity in the short term.  Giraffic Inc., dedicated to the development of the Next Generation Intelligent Peer-to-Peer Video-on-Demand (P2P-VOD) Acceleration and Delivery Technology, today announced the introduction of Peer-to-Peer Seek-Forward, another industry first for P2P-VOD. 

With many networks or transit points projected to reach capacity and fear of frequent Internet generalized congestion in 2011, Giraffic's Seek-Forward functionality is a further step in enabling users to quickly and efficiently watch the videos that interests them, the way they want to watch them.  Viewers can stream a video and then jump forward to any point in the video and start viewing it again from there.  This is particularly critical with "long-form" video (movies, TV programs, and other videos which are more than 20 minutes long).

Giraffic is now the first VOD to support P2P Seek Forward functionality so that a user can jump ahead in the video, but still gets data from P2P.  While some previous P2P technologies can either enable seek or enable the user to jump ahead in the video by falling back on the server or CDN for delivery, only Giraffic's P2P technology commits entirely to P2P based VOD, making Giraffic's Seek-Forward an industry first.  More features and capabilities are expected to follow in the future.

Building on its highly innovative architecture, Giraffic is proud to introduce the industry's first seek-forward functionality. When streaming a video, users can now jump to any point inside a video, as they are used to with DVDs or DVRs, without effectively loosing the benefit of Giraffic's Accelerated P2P network and causing the player to fall back on a CDN server like other solutions do.

"We must find creative solutions that will help alleviate the VOD capacity issues that could congest the Internet. We at Giraffic are delighted to provide creative and timely solutions to today's problems and remain steadfast to the commitment of leading  the P2P VOD Acceleration revolution with breakthrough innovations, like Seek-Forward, "said Yoel Zanger, CEO and Founder of Giraffic. "Seek-Forward is only the beginning for Giraffic's plans on accomplishing in 2011 to lead the fast-growing VOD Acceleration industry."

Mr. Zanger noted that the Seek-Forward breakthrough is just the latest in a series of industry-leading firsts, including its patent pending asynchronous coded multi-source streaming (enabling Giraffic's P2P VOD to fetch data from hundreds of simultaneous users in RANDOM order and hence out-performing other distributed streaming technologies) and its unique ability to support "long-tail" content from P2P (and not just the really popular stuff like other P2P systems do).

Also, the company, in November, announced that it had teamed up with UK-based Craze Digital - the Digital Entertainment Company to launch the new www.OnlineMoviesBox.com - which now supports Seek-forward too.

Like it has for Craze Digital, Giraffic's technology guarantees high availability and buffering-free video streaming for highly popular blockbusters and niche, "long-tail" content alike.  Giraffic offers the world's best P2P-VoD solution which accelerates streaming, eliminates re-buffering pauses and enables instant delivery of all the video on demand content, regardless of its popularity.  Whether content is viewed thousands of times, or only by a handful of viewers globally - Giraffic can accelerate and serve it instantly, on demand from other end-users systems via P2P, offloading a dramatic portion from CDN or origin servers and improving end-user experience substantially, particularly for High Definition video streaming.

Giraffic provides the perfect solution for media companies, content distributors, video sharing sites, software game developers, social networks, and device manufacturers to the benefit of all users' online media experience, solving one of the most important issues in online video streaming today - the need to effectively deliver online movies at High Definition, without re-buffering pauses and at manageable bandwidth costs. 

VOD content distributors that rely on pure CDN solutions encounter growing congestion issues and push back from majors ISPs as they consume a growing percentage of incoming traffic. Giraffic's aim is to minimize redundant traffic by leveraging peer proximity and regional peer caching.

A comprehensive research report published last May by the EBU (European Broadcaster Union) concluded:

"...

As the creation and consumption continue to grow, the traffic volumes will grow at an even faster pace. As the video files and streams are very large, the danger is that the network load becomes unsustainable and the Internet may eventually collapse.

To ease the network load, novel distribution technologies are required. It has now become clear that the centralized server-client approaches practiced by many network providers are no longer the only viable proposition and that distributed models are rapidly developing to support more Internet traffic.

To this end, the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) system - as a representative of a decentralized, distributed network architecture - continues to be an attractive solution for carrying media across the Internet...

..."

Giraffic's Technology offers a new bottom-up approach to Peer-to-Peer CDN, focusing entirely on Robust, HD optimized Video-on-Demand streaming:

• Significantly improves streaming reliability and end user experience, even compared to carrier class CDNs (reduces buffering by 50-70%).
• Optimized delivery technology for High Definition Video, overcoming most of the bottlenecks and reliability issues around HD delivery.
• Supports real time VoD delivery from Peer-to-Peer for popular and "long-tail" content alike: Content Providers can deliver from P2P to viewers across the internet all of their on-demand content, not just their hits, at HD quality, regardless of location or content popularity.
• Dramatic bandwidth cost reduction: Peer-to-Peer effectiveness of over 80% from total customer VOD traffic. (Including initial views and "long-tail").
• Cross-platform and very low footprint.
• Supports multiple players, encoding formats and streaming protocols (such as HTTP, RTMP)
• Seamless integration and deployment with fully automated management.
• Comprehensive statistics and reporting on network performance, end-user experience and bandwidth savings.
• Inherent infinite scalability. While traffic, number of users and video quality (=bit-rate) grow, network capacity grows in parallel.