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."

Now who will I choose...

[Super Dave Osbourne]

Its hard, to go with the legal BT or the illegal T, somehow like iTunes success we will see the studios wise up and fight the legality battle on the convenience front. Folks are willing to pay, if convenient and easy. Torrents are super fast if you have pipe, and pipe is what BT is going to offer. I'm for one lining up to purchase pay per view streaming with BT when it comes, until then, NetFlix has my butt in a sling.

pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[mr_stinky_britches]

With video that will get chewed through rather quickly. 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. Punish me and mod me down, but I really must inquire.. When did a company signing up for a gigabit line become slashdot worthy? :/

What I want to know is

[Dowda]

will this get me porn any faster?

1GB/Sec

[Nom du Keyboard]

1 gigabyte per second, while it will certainly present you with a sizable bandwidth bill, doesn't sound all that fast to me to stream videos.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[x2A]

No, you're paying once, but in two different ways; two different currencies.

If you don't wanna contribute to the upload, you gotta pay them more because they need a bigger out pipe.

Streaming?

[cimmer]

I'm not sure how one provides streaming video via BitTorrent. Video is linear. BT downloads are inherently non-linear.

Any attempt to explain is appreciated. Thanks!

J

Solution looking for a problem

[Sanity]

P2P distribution makes sense when the distributer can't afford the bandwidth, but there are numerous video distribution sites who appear to be having very little trouble just distributing videos from a central server (youtube, google video, revver etc). Why would any user endure the trouble of installing a client, and waiting for an entire video to download before they can watch it, when they can just go to another site and watch it immediately.

I'm all for P2P where it is needed, but video over BitTorrent sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

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

[SeaDour]

Don't you even know how BitTorrent works? The bandwidth is distributed -- the initial seeds might have to come from the main BT servers, but almost everyone will download their content from other BitTorrent users.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Firehed]

Probably true, but what about the people that do saturate their bandwidth (like myself)? Is WB going to force seeding to 100%, charge you extra or ban you from further downloads if you don't?

The endproduct of this will be more expensive or flaky internet connections. If the oversold bandwidth that was chugging along happily suddenly fills up, everyone connected is screwed. Until the ISP upgrades their stuff accordingly (which could well mean laying new/more fiber), everyone has a crappy connection. Someone's gotta pay for the upgrades, and you can bet that those costs are going to make it to the consumers, and most likely fairly quickly. Either by changing their pricing structure, molesting upload bandwidth into nothingness, or starting a per-bit charge. Or leading up to tiered connections.

However it happens, you pay twice.

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

[SlashChick]

Uh... because a T1 is 1.5Mbit both directions. Your 4Mbit line may be 4Mbit download, but its upload speed is likely... what, 256K? 384K? If you need to serve anything heavier than DNS, you'll want a faster upload speed than that. Hence the need for T1s and larger symmetrical UPLOAD pipes.

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

[timeOday]

With video that will get chewed through rather quickly.

I think you are missing the point. Getting bandwidth is the easy part, bandwidth is cheap. In contrast, getting major studios to legally distribute content over bittorrent is a minor miracle. Now the door is open.

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

[Lehk228]

a T1 is only a meg and a half, though unlike consumer broadband connections you can use your T1 at 100% capacity all the time and nobody will give you shit for it since you pay through the nose for it.

Re:I'd be really excited about this, if...

[kjart]

FYI, I use Shaw as well and find that uTorrent [utorrent.com] can get around Ellacoya just fine using protcol encryption. Went from around 10k to hitting the caps with that one setting.

Cheers

Re:Solution looking for a problem

[graystar]

These sites all have crap resolution.

If you download a nice encoded X264 file, plug your tv into computer, stereo into computer - you get lovely TV quality video with NO SKIPPING and BUFFERING. I just set up a few shows I want to watch, go to work, come home and watch them.

Now imagine a MythTV et all set top box with RSS feeds of bittorrents....

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

[RemovableBait]

The problem with this scheme (there may be others, I'm not claiming to be an expert on content distribution) is that most of the BitTorrent traffic at the moment is due to illegal downloads. I'll bet a massive chunk of it'll be TPB related. Don't get me wrong here, I realise we're talking about legal stuff, but don't be under the illusion that those legal-and-properly-licensed files are what made BitTorrent take off (I'm going to ignore Linux ISOs at the moment, but bear with me).

BitTorrent, while requiring trackers, is a distributed network. There are no specific 'areas' where files are held that could possibly be subject to **AA lawsuits (and others). The problem with your newsgroup situation is that the files are hosted on a server, owned and operated by someone. People can connect to that server, and the copyright holders can flex the DMCA and have your ISP shut the connection down. Thus, BT is a very good way of sharing bandwidth on a P2P basis where it is totally impractical and very difficult to trace the people in a swarm. See? BitTorrent is really, really good for TPB stuff and illegal things -- hence it took off and became a buzzword of sorts.

Now that Hollywood are in on this hip-new-Bit-wave-thingy, the legal downloads will begin. Realistically, the Hollywood content providers couldn't give a rat's ass about the internet... they just want to save some cash on bandwidth and server costs by using BitTorrent, which (as you say, inefficiently) takes the bandwidth burden away and pushes it onto the users. It would probably cost the Hollywood guys a lot more to set up NNTP-type servers across the globe, hence that idea will never happen. Although, why they're too cheap to use something like Akamai beats me.

The Linux distros are in a similar position. They use BT as a means of serving large files like DVD ISO images, without costing a fortune in server and bandwidth costs. I mean, lets face it, there are many distros that are just a couple of guys in a basement... without BT they'd never be able to distribute their stuff. They certainly can't afford the infrastructure, server and bandwidth costs of NNTP-type global distribution.

Oh, and before I go. Your home DSL line will probably be capped at 1.5 Mbps download, but around 384 Kbps upload. Which do you think matters more for BT? :)

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

[billcopc]

You went to such great lengths to validate the concept of a News Server for video distribution.. but really all that's needed is Akamai. They already have their caching servers all over the world, just as you described.

Also the fact that most ISP's have already abandoned NNTP servers (in spirit if not in body). That's why everyone who is serious about Usenet now has to pay 10-15$ a month for a commercial service like Easynews, Giganews or Astraweb. I used to, back when I had a fat pipe because I did most of my binary xfers through Usenet and it was gorgeous. I still prefer it over Bittorrent for speed and reliability, but since BT is so simple and has tons of users I'd be foolish to ignore it, as I can reach a much larger audience with an easy-to-seed torrent, rather than uploading to a newsserver for hours, then having to honor fill requests for those sheep who are trying to use their ISP's broken NNTP server.

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

[monsted]

Actually, NNTP is a horribly ineffective way of moving binaries. Once you're done with the encoding, you're using about 50% more bandwidth than the size of the actual file. It also places a large load on the NNTP server - much more than serving the same files with, say, apache.

What you'll really want is an akamai-approach, but that way the studios can't hand off the costs to the ISPs like a bittorrent download does.

It's a press release

[nobleheath]

Global Netoptex Inc. wanted to advertise that they have a high profile customer and consequently that other customers might find their service satisfactory; and BitTorrent wanted to remind their investors that they have an arrangement with Warner and consequently that potential investors might want to consider sending a little money their way. So they issued a joint press release. Don't read too much into the bandwidth - GigE comes with PC's these days and dont read too much into the re-announcement of the Warner thing. This is just cheap advertising and it would appear the /. fell for it.