Google's Hangouts Changes To P2P

Many artists and bands use Google's Hangouts On Air to engage with their fans. This includes everything from mini-concerts to online meet and greets (I use it as part of Webinarjam for my webinars), and while it was reliable, there was always a question with its audio quality, especially when it came to music.

Google has now rolled out Hangouts 7.0, and while it has a number of cool features, the main upgrade is that it now uses a peer-to-peer connection, or P2P, between Hangout users who are on the call.

The reason is to make the calls more efficient, and as a result, take the audio and video quality up a notch to generally improve the experience.

Previously, the call would go through Google's servers, and while the company has what many consider one of the most robust backbone's in the world, the connection was always as solid as you'd expect, hence the move to P2P.

One of the potential downsides of using the P2P connection though is that each user's IP address is revealed, which means their location could be discovered and their privacy compromised as a result.

There's talk that the P2P feature may be selectively disabled in the future, but that's not the case at the moment.

So if you're a Hangouts users, enjoy the new features and increased quality. If you live in an area where you'd like to protect your IP address and privacy, maybe it's better to use another platform for the time being.

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The Lie That Fuels The Music Industry’s Paranoia

We’ve heard it for a decade now. “We’re losing more than half of our music sales thanks to digital piracy,” says the music industrial complex. The problem is that the music industry has freaked itself out so continually over hyped-up numbers attributed to music piracy that it can’t tell the facts from the reality anymore. The truth of the matter is that while music piracy was a real live problem at one point in the past, today it’s just a distant memory.

Don’t believe me? Let me give you a couple of data points:

• A study released earlier this month by networking company Sandvine on Internet traffic trends found that peer to peer traffic is now below 10%, down from 31% five years ago and 60% eleven years ago. Less P2P traffic equals less piracy according to a report from Envisional.

• Meanwhile, a combination of Netflix and YouTube now account for more than 51% of all Internet traffic in North America. YouTube is now the go-to platform for consuming music for US teens according to Nielsen’s annual Music 360 report, with more than 64% of teens consuming their music that way.

Here’s the bottom line - people don’t pirate songs anymore because they don’t need to. They can get whatever they want for free online via YouTube or a streaming service like Spotify.

After all, what’s the point of clogging up your hard drive with songs that you rarely listen to when you can have access to literally millions more any time and any place you want, and a lot more conveniently too? And why try to steal a song from a Torrent when you’re not sure if what you’re downloading is the original song or if it’s encrypted, corrupted or spoofed? You can waste a lot of time just trying to find a usable song to listen to. Who needs that? Read more on Forbes.

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