BitTorrent Beefs Up Network Capabilities

1sockchuck writes "BitTorrent Inc. is boosting its network capacity as it prepares to become a centralized hub for legal video content. In May, BitTorrent announced a deal with Warner Brothers to distribute its TV and movie content via the BT platform. It has now lined up IP transit for streaming videos at one gigabit per second."

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Chapium]

Many of us do not pay per megabyte on our cable services. The uploading is just using up bandwith that goes idle anyways. I believe this is true for a majority of the people in my community, with a few exceptions of a small group running eMule heavily.

Duke City Shootout

[GMFTatsujin]

<Shill mode="intern">

It's not just the big studios. Smaller non-profit festivals are reaping huge exposure and benefits from allying with BitTorrent.

Every year for the past seven years, there's a film making festival called the Duke City Shootout in Albuquerque NM. The idea is that writers from all over the country submit a 10-12 page script, seven of the best get picked out, and the Shootout brings them to Albuquerque to help the writers film their scripts.

No, not pro writers. Guys like you and me. (Well, depending on who you are, it might just be me.)

Respected professionals in the film world (read: Morgan Freeman) are heavily involved behind the scenes, and some of them mentor the crews on the set. One week of madness later, you've got yourself seven brand new indie success stories and a whole lot of exhausted, happy people.

The Duke City Shootout is super cool, and a great place to get your hands on new and interesting video gear. It's literally top of the line digital tech. Apple, BitTorrent, Intel, and a host of other companies are footing the bill so that they can show what can be done by dedicated, creative amateurs with a little guidance and the right toys.

BitTorrent is one of the sponsors this year. They're going to distribute the winning films for free, and they've even got a backload of winners from years past. Admittedly it's not like downloading a complete cinematic experience -- the Duke City Shootout download will, for example, finish the day you start it.

Check it out for yourself: Duke City Shootout [dukecityshootout.org] home site, and the BitTorrent host [bittorrent.com] for the last year's winners.
</shill>

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see, even at a low average bitrate of 2mbps, that would only be able to stream to 500 people simultaneously (then w/ the added capacity bittorrent gives, you will get a little more capacity, but even 500 people uploading at 20KB/s only gives you roughly 1/10th extra capacity.

Do you know how bittorrent works? The maximum theoretical download speed is the seed speed, regardless of the number of downloaders. With 1 Gbit/s, you can stream 500 different torrents at 2mbps to a any number of people (neglecting tracker bandwidth, as it were). That's assuming that they're all uploading at the same speed that they're downloading.

If they're uploading significantly slower than they're downloading, yes, the swarm speed will go down. However any intelligent seed will cut your download speed correspondingly. That's how bittorrent works.

Re:Ehhh...

[Don Negro]

The 1 Gb pipe is for seeding, to make sure a swarm can never die. If only one person is downloading a given file, it'll end up being a straight download, but if there's anybody else in the swarm, the BitTorrent effect will kick in and improve things for everyone.

Re:Streaming?

[Don Negro]

They're not selling streaming video, they're selling downloads to own.

There are some nifty things you can do for BitTorrent-assisted streaming, but that's not what they're up to right now.

2Mbps is low?!

[dreamlax]

Wow, you must demand some really decent quality video. Your average 90 minute MPEG4/XviD/DivX 700MB movie is between 0.8 and 1.2 Mbps ((700 * 8)Mb / (90 * 60)sec = 1.03 Mbps) including audio. This quality is surely decent enough for video streaming... So if 2Mbps is low in your opinion, I would like to know what sort of video you normally stream and where you get it from (and what codec it uses). 2Mbps can usually encode a DVD with all 6 channels of audio and full DVD resolution with noticeable but little quality loss (when quantisers and variable bitrate settings are used correctly).

And please adapt yourself to the correct metric abbreviations. A lowercase m represents "milli", i.e. 1/1000, and an uppercase m represents mega, i.e. 1,000,000, because I am sure you intended to say 2 megabits per second and not 2 millibits per second.

Re:commercial coercion is not easy when its free.

[bigmammoth]

Collocation is very different from hosting on a shared server (physical places charge rent, physical space is taken up, heat considerations, electrical power, personal to deal with secure physical access etc) add a great deal to the cost. Compared to a millimeter (or less) space on a Hard Drive. You have to buy a lot for bandwidth for it to become cheep hence shared hosting is cheaper than collocation.

My point is simply that bandwidth is very cheep relative to the cost of the content if the content is being sold. So if you pay 99c for a song on itunes like 0.001% of that is going to bandwidth costs. The same will be true for films maybe 0.1% of the total cost this rivals the ratios that nike pays for manufacturing their shoes ;)