http://mermaid.metaaso.com

Traditional Client/Server based multimedia software systems are
expensive to create and maintain. It costs over a billion dollars
every month to serve videos to a billion people around the globe.
Video sharing websites are a proof of that, and are still reeling
under heavy infrastructure costs. If YouTube served 3 min. video clips
to 100m users everyday in 2006 costing $1.2m per month, it would cost
$5.8 billion per month to serve 24 hour TV to a billion users. The
world population is more than that, and certainly this price tag is
limiting internet television and global multimedia applications.

MetaASO believes that a solution to an economical worldwide multimedia
broadcast system can be based on Peer To Peer (P2P) software. Using
the combined resources of the broadcaster and the receivers, it is
very practical for a user to broadcast real-time audio/video/data to
millions/billions of people globally, using just his/her home PC and a
256 kbps internet connection.

MetaASO Solutions, a startup based out of India, has released its Free
Mermaid Product Line. It includes five products that operate over a
P2P network catering to the needs of various audiences. These products
are Mermaid Meeting, Mermaid News, Mermaid Webcam, Mermaid Movie, and
Mermaid Multisource.

Mermaid Meeting is a P2P video conferencing software, that is capable
of voice, text, video and desktop sharing.

Mermaid News is a P2P information exchange system that brings multiple
readers and experts of a particular interest, together onto a common
network. Any news published on the common network by an expert reaches
every reader instantly, rather than making the reader search and poll
the news from RSS or websites.

Mermaid Multisource and Mermaid Webcam are software capable of LIVE
audio/video broadcast through sources including Desktop-Screen, TV-
Tuner cards, Webcams, Handy-Cams, and Radio cards.

Mermaid Movie is a revolutionary product that allows users to
broadcast movies to millions of users globally.

The Mermaid Suite works on LANs and Internet alike without any
modifications, though it needs an ipv6 address to broadcast on a
global level.

Most P2P softwares have been at the receiving end of critics and
debates, and are often regarded as illegal file sharing tools. This
outlook is naïve at best because the same technology if used to
address the real time communication needs of the world can provide
regular users with an economical and reliable method to communicate
with other users around the globe in a one-to-one, many-to-many, or
one-to-world-wide-broadcast fashion.

When the internet was born every computer was connected to every other
computer. As the internet evolved it transformed into a system where
some systems were at the center, controlling and routing everything,
and providing services to the rest. And the internet became a mess of
NAT's/ Router's/ Proxy's. This is known to be uneconomical and
infeasible for global scale applications. The P2P v2.0 technology
levels the playing field and puts the power in the hands of the
citizens to use a decentralized worldwide multimedia communications
platform for free.

http://mermaid.metaaso.com