Snoop star
Snoopstar was a meta search engine for file sharing networks, with the help of which one could find music and video files in different file sharing networks and download them at the same time.
technology
concept
Snoopstar is considered to be the first P2P client that was able to connect to several music exchanges at the same time. The software was able to send search queries to the connected P2P networks. The search results were presented in a consolidated list of results.
The files concerned could be downloaded across protocols and in parallel. The individual file fragments were put together using hash sums and an overlap heuristic, which ensured that the downloaded file was complete and correct.
Snoopstar decided not to upload downloaded files back to the connected P2P networks and was only available for Windows.
Supported P2P networks
The supported file sharing protocols included:
History
Idea and foundation
Snoopstar was invented in April 2000 by then Bertelsmann AG employee Matthias Runte and developed by the Bertelsmann subsidiary Snoopstar.com GmbH from July 2000 in Hamburg. In addition to Runte, the Bertelsmann Direct Group as the majority shareholder, Michel Clement and another Bertelsmann employee were involved in Snoopstar .
Beta test
On February 5, 2001, Snoopstar started a beta test that was limited to 1000 users. The press coverage was great, for three main reasons:
- Snoopstar was an innovative product, which conceptually overshadowed the performance in terms of search hits and download speed of the file sharing tools that existed at the time of the beta test.
- The role of Bertelsmann as a global media group, which apparently took part in a music exchange , played a major role.
- The ambiguous technology from Snoopstar, which only allowed files to be downloaded but not to be uploaded again to the networks, caused a stir in the community - especially against the backdrop of Bertelsmann's involvement.
The beta test only ran for a week and ended on February 12, 2001. Further tests and the complete launch of the software were not carried out under pressure from the majority shareholder Bertelsmann, who could not use any counter-arguments in the fight against other P2P services by operating their own file-sharing software and was completely surprised by the great response in the media world.
The End
The Snoopstar company ceased operations at the end of 2002 and was merged with Reinhard Mohn GmbH in 2004.
More Snoopstar products
As a company, Snoopstar developed two other products in addition to the P2P meta search engine Snoopstar , neither of which were published.
For one, there was a PC-based video recorder called Thunderweather that could upload the recorded content to other users. With the help of Thunderweather, a worldwide secondary marketing network for television content was created. The right holders of the television content could object to the distribution of the content or participate in the advertising income through secondary marketing.
On the other hand, Snoopstar developed the P2P distribution platform OzKaa for large media files such as movies or TV series, which should significantly reduce the data transmission costs for the service provider. The name OzKaa is based on the file sharing service Kazaa, which was already very popular at the time .
literature
- Janko Röttgers : Mix, Burn & RIP - The End of the Music Industry , Verlag Heinz Heise, 2003, ISBN 3-936931-08-9 . Also available free of charge as a PDF version from the publisher - contains information about the history and background of Snoopstar.
Web links
- Heise Online from February 5, 2001: "Power Napster" for permanent vacuum cleaners
- CNN Online of February 27, 2001: Bertelsmann testing secret Napster clone