WindowsSecrets' Brian Livingston broke the news this week that CNN's live streaming of the inauguration on January 20th was enabled by a P2P plugin, Octoshape Grid Delivery.

"Web surfers who visit CNN.com and select a live video stream for the first time see in their browsers a dialog box... saying, 'This site requires the Octoshape Grid Delivery enhancement for Adobe Flash Player,'" livingston explains. "The dialog box doesn't appear when playing an ordinary video file, only when starting a live feed."

"Thus far, CNN has not commented in public on their use of Octoshape's P2P plugin," writes Ernesto at TorrentFreak. "However, from an insider who's familiar with the technology, TorrentFreak learned that approximately 30% of the bandwidth for CNN's live stream comes from peers. This obviously results in a significant reduction in bandwidth costs for the broadcaster. The rest of the bandwidth still comes from central servers to ensure that there is enough available for everyone."

"There are definite useful ways to make use of P2P to spread out the bandwidth, but it needs to be done in a much more transparent, reasonable and safe manner," writes Techdirt's Mike Masnick. "Unfortunately, this implementation doesn't seem to have done that."

More here from NewTeeVee ... more here from Truthdig ... more here from The Inquisitr ... and more here from Beet.TV.