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."

Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Zzesers92]

Am I the only one who feels like the fool when I'm PAYING twice for content? Once to download, and a second time to upload that same data to the next fool?

I'm not an "info should be free" wacko by any means. But I'm also not going to sacrifice my precious bandwidth to make WB money. If you want to charge me for content, you pay for the fat pipes so that the consumer (us all) are satisfied.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Super Dave Osbourne]

When you buy a CD you are paying at least 2 times for the content, so BT and the studios should not bring you to your knees in new pain. CD manufactures make money, the labels, the packaging, the retail, the studios, you pay many times over for content now. What BT and studio is going to do is shift the distribution money to a new player like BT, and over time BT and others will be rolled into the studios, or even become them (however I would recommend the former, later by holding out just the right time and sell). I have no problem with BT becoming the media distribution arm (for a while) for the studios. The studios actually played their cards well, watching tech as it developed for the past 8 years, and now pouncing on what has become the consumer paid network they can leverage and make a killing. I'm for BT, it sounds convenient, it is fast, and if they can do it so I can pay with PayPal and have movie theatre experiences with sound and light, I'm guessing the theatre is just about ready to die.

Ehhh...

[Psionicist]

"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."

The whole freaking point of BitTorrent is to transfer files so you don't need a fat pipe. Why exactly do they need 1 gigabit per second to run a tracker? Not even The Pirate Bay run on 1 gbps pipes.

I don't buy this. I think the MPAA just want to launch a regular distributor->consumer (as in, not-P2P) service under the BitTorrent-name so they can fool the regular joes this whole BitTorrent-thing has nothing at all to do with P2P. After all, real P2P is the complete opposite of their bussiness modell, so they probably don't want it generally accepted.

Re:Upsides to BitTorrent as a distro meth.

[TheDugong]

"which results in less overall cost, which results in savings passed to the consumer."

I'll believe it when I see it.

New releases are AU$7 at my local video shop 2 mins walk away open 10am to 10pm 7 days. We watch most films we want to watch at the cinema anyway.

Better be very cheap, if they want me to help with distribution!

Re:1GB/Sec

[Super Dave Osbourne]

actually all you need is 50-60 feeds out, the seeds mature and grow and the network supports the rest. 50-60 movies seeded by the studio (via BT) is plenty. Given 4-5 hours 10-20 seeds will take over where the orginal started. BT is just at the right place, right time, right contract, and eventually will become part of a studio. Now the question is how do they license the PPV torrent streaming, with encryption/passwords? I still smell captures and rebroadcasting of the actual viewing experience. Nobody is going to stop theft, the studios are trying hard now to make it easier to purchase than 'steal'. Whatever happened to sneaking into the theatre thru the exit doors? :)

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

[screeble]

.. my isp (shaw) didn't use Ellacoya traffic shapers to filter BT (and most other p2p) traffic down to a snail's pace right now.

I would be amazed to see any BT traffic over about 10kB/s these days. It's not Bit torrent... It's bit treacle.

Paying for video-on-demand and then having to wait a week to watch the show doesn't seem very enticing to me. Of course, Shaw has their own VOD mechanisms via digital cable so this filtering may just be a thinly veiled part of the Big Plan to Screw Consumers.

Re:1GB/Sec

[jonnythan]

Huh. A typical DVD is 9MB/s.

A typical HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movie is going to be 15-30MB/s.

I'm not sure what kind of 1.7MB/s movie I'd be paying for.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[timeOday]

Effectively, bittorrent uses twice the bandwidth of a simple HTTP link to a server on the backbone. Partially due to protocol overhead, although that is not the real issue. The real issue is that P2P traffic traverses the "last mile" of network connectivity twice, and that last mile (to your home) is the bottleneck of the Internet. Doubling the load on your bottleneck is not a smart thing to do for the overall Internet. It does happen to pay off at the moment, simply because servers pay per byte and home connections pay per month. Eventually the bandwidth market might re-align to the technical reality, but then again maybe not.

Besides that, bittorrent is bad for media distribution because you can't stream. Let's say you have a 2 mbit/s link to your home and want to watch a two-hour movie which happens to be encoded at 2 mbit/s. If the movie were sent from a server at a steady rate, you could start watching immediately. With bittorrent, you'd have to wait two hours.

Finally, I just don't see the point. They're going to be charging several dollars for each video download, yet the server bandwidth for that download is only worth about a nickle. It just doesn't avoid that much expense. As a customer, I'd rather pay the extra 0.5% to download from a server and start watching immediately, and keep my uplink for my own purposes.

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

[Mika_Lindman]

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.

Most people have less bandwidth for uploading than downloading. So yes, the swarm speed will go down.

And if I pay $ for my movie, I won't seed it full speed for 2 weeks after downloading, which I may do in case of my favourite linux distro torrents.

It's great, but...

[metroplex]

It's great that somebody is organizing a legal pay-per-download service based on bittorrent on a large scale, but teaming up with Warner Bros? Shouldn't they have first started by teaming up with some smaller, possibly independent production house? Or test it with short movies first? I would certainly pay to download beautiful short movies, they take up less time to dosnload and you often only get a chance to see them at film festivals or collected on dvds several years after their release, if you are lucky. A bittorrent hub dedicated to selling short movies (and not just independent ones) would be a winner, in my opinion. With the general increase of bandwidth for home lines in both directions, you could easily get a short in less than a hour.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Deezire]

"With bittorrent, you'd have to wait two hours."

What if you download the movie in small bits (heck, thats what bittorrent do) wouldnt you then be able to see that "bit" of movie? Second of all, this is not even new. http://www.tvkoo.com/ [tvkoo.com] has been doing this for years. (Someone makes a stream and hooks it up to their tracker, making it avaliable for everyone).

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

[jrockway]

> It's 256K or 384K only during the night and early day. Between 14:00 and 23:00, it's more like 4K -- with pings of 4K ms, too.

I have Speakeasy's 6M/768k plan, and it's always 6M/768. It's never been down, and I've never seen any speeds lower than that (except when I'm connecting to a server that can't send data that fast :P).

Their tech support is pretty good, too. My plan has 8 IPs, but I couldn't activate them on the web form. I sent them an e-mail at 11:00PM on a Friday night (yes, yes, setting up routers is what I do for fun on Friday night...), and in 15 minutes they were active and I had a message in my mailbox saying so.

Anyway, that obviously isn't business level support, but it's good enough for me. I guess other people are paying like $30/mo for DSL and I pay $115, but I don't watch TV or have to pay for utilities (directly), so it's a good deal for me. Highly recommended.

reward system

[john_uy]

since many people already mention that you are paying for the content as well as distributing it, why not put a reward system for the seeders.

a particular gb, let say, will allow you to convert it to credits used to pay for new movies. seeders and wb will be happy. i'm sure there will be a lot more of leechers than seeders.