PeerFactor, a French IT company based in Paris, will open non-public beta website of it's system named PeerFactor HD (High speed Downloading) next week. The system will allow webmasters to deliver large files for free or at a very low cost.

The system goal is to allow webmasters to publish content faster than with traditional http direct download. But the downloads for end users will remain as simple as usual. It will work this way:

• Webmasters provide us a large piece of content (video, game, music albums,...)
• The content will be pre-cached on several hundred PCs around the world that have installed PeerFactor P2P.
• We will provide a link for the webmasters to put on their website.
• Internet users will download with a very small P2P client (200Ko) at very high speed (up to 2Mo/s).

The system will have the advantages of http direct link download (simplicity and performance) and P2P download (cost reduction and scalability). The cost and speed will remain the same for 10 or 100,000 downloads. Users won't need to know anything about peer to peer and webmasters don't need to educate them how to use a tool generally used for piracy. As the content will be pre-cached on several hundred computers, the system is designed to minimize and prevent system failures.

PeerFactor HD will be an ideal complement to streaming or podcast for web TV or video blog. The cost reduction could allow high definition video delivery supported by advertisement to become a viable business.

The dedicated website will be in English and French.

Users will be able to tag, comment and rate the files in the system. This will allow to increase performance as the best file will be downloaded more.
br> The beta period will allow PeerFactor to optimize and tune pre-caching and delivery algorithms.

Web Page to register for the beta : http://www.peerfactor.fr/peerfactor_hd.htm