Norwegian Broadcaster Evaluates BitTorrent Distribution Costs 175
FrostPaw writes "An experiment was conducted recently by Norwegian broadcasting company NRK involving the release of the series 'Nordkalotten 365' (a wildlife program) in a DRM free format using BitTorrent. One of the broadcasters has posted the approximate figures for the overall distribution costs, and discussed his reasons for doing so. Their estimated cost for using Amazon S3 to offer the files through HTTP/FTP/etc. come to approximately 41,000 NOK (about $8,000 US). However, when using the Amazon servers as the originating seed and utilizing BitTorrent, their total cost for distribution of the entire project, thanks to generous seeds, would amount to approximately 1,700 NOK. The post with the original figures is available only in Norwegian.
At last! (Score:5, Funny)
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Mynd you, møøse bites kan be pretty nästi.
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This Just In: (Score:5, Insightful)
Making other people do your work for free makes your own costs cheaper. Film at 11.
In other words, why is this news? It's something that has been obvious about BitTorrent since day 1: if you can get/make your users use their own upload bandwidth, you won't need as much of your own, and in a cost model that means your costs are lower. Did this really require a study?
Re:This Just In: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This Just In: (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Right now networks can only own one station per market. With HD they can in theory broadcast multiple streams on it, but only a few. With online distribution they could put out as much content as they would like.
2. Right now anybody can record and redistribute the off-the-air content. So, DRM is trying to lock up the front door when the back door is already wide open.
3. Right now due to inefficient distribution schemes shows only run in a local market, creating a huge demand for online content. Typically this content lacks commercials, and is ignored when calculating ratings even if it did.
4. If a TV station made it EASY to download their shows with full commercials they'd take over the market overnight. The big networks could collaborate to make it easy to watch their shows just like watching TV. Who would mess around with nzb files and all that when you could just fire up your online "Tivo" and it has already downloaded everything you're interested in. The polished experience would give them 99% of the market all the time.
5. Sure, in theory somebody could find some way to redistribute their content and strip out all the commercials, but the scale of this task except for a few shows would be hard to match with the level of polish that the networks could deliver. They would still own copyright so they would only need to deal with distributed bands of unpaid volunteers redistributing their work - if anybody tried to organize they could be dealt with in court. The court cases would be stronger since the networks could convine local governments that they are actually genuinely trying to get their content to everyone (right now some countries turn a blind eye to copyright violation since it enables their consumers to get access to TV they wouldn't ever see otherwise).
It seems like the TV execs are missing a huge opportunity that they could just own without issue if they just stepped out and took advantage of it.
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The big problem with Fancast right now is that you can't watch the content there at full screen size, you have to watch it in your browser.
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It would only take one diehard fan record the time signatures for an entire series.. And only one good hacker to open up fastforward across an entire DRM scheme.
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You could do something like this today with DVRs, and yet it doesn't happen - for precisely these reasons.
The TV execs don't need to keep EVERYBODY from skipping ads. If they get 95% of the public to watch the ads (or even 50%) they can make a fortune. Most people won't bother setting up all kinds of 3rd
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Because media and corporate people are morons? I've wondered for nearly a decade why even regular stream is considered a poor cousin and a toy. If I'm listening to a radio station in Paris I might not understand every word, but I'll pick out "Coca-Cola". There should be some fund of Coca-Cola International that the station is collecting from to support that
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Sure, people could strip them out and make a competing version since there is no DRM. But:
1. How many people would bother to even look for the ad-free version? Sure, most people here would, but that just means TV execs will have to live with losing 0.001% of their profits...
2. Who is going to bother to strip all those ads and redistribute? Sure, maybe for Battlestar Galactica, but most geeks with time to kill don't do this stuff for the other 95% o
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How are they going to determine what the ads are worth and who is going to decide that?
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How do you decide what your house is worth when you sell it? Simple - you offer a price and haggle until it is worked out. Happens every day in ad agencies worldwide...
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I just don't see the downside to online distribution. All the "negatives" associated with it are already here today. Networks have to deal with that stuff already. So why not at least capture some of the upside of the online world?
Re:This Just In: AdBlock comes to video. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, and the online content would be as well. They're already surviving in the world you describe - you can get most shows today ad-free, and yet almost nobody does. Oh sure, the average slashdotter might, but I'm talking about the other 99.999% of folks who have money to spend on advertised products.
Right. Much like the NYT distributing their content for the price of signing up, and see how they're taking over the market.
Uh, the online news market is dominated by probably 3-4 companies (I'm talking about the content and the ads - not the portal people visit through). To the extent that they're losing out it is to companies like google who are doing exactly what I'm suggesting the TV networks should do. All of them were traditional news networks before the internet came along. I don't see your point. No one network would beat out all its peers by doing online - but they could make a lot more money this way.
Apple TV.
Uh, what will Apple TV do? Make it easy for people to download TV shows with random filenames posted to random distribution networks by random people? Easier than obtaining the TV from a couple of TV networks distributing shows via standardized protocols over big pipes with lots of infrastructure behind them? I'm sure the networks would give Apple a cut for every referral - the button to watch Battlestar Galactica from the official sources will be bold and on page 1, and the option to configure browsing through random files on TPB will be buried on configuration page 12...
Yeah right! (linked to TPB)
Ok, go ahead and schedule 10 TV shows to auto-download all episodes from TPB so that your 80-year-old grandmother can just click on the show they want and watch it on their TV using a remote control (not a keyboard). Oh wait - the 10 shows don't have any metadata, and the filenames aren't consistent, and a few are posts by guys who didn't bother to seed.
Sure, TPB works, but not well. And it won't have the Gardening special that aired last night or anything not of interest to geeks (who make up all of 1% of the population).
And TPB exists now, and for whatever reason 99% of everybody doesn't use it. Maybe everybody you know does, but most people don't. So this isn't a new threat. And going online will probably actually help to combat it, as opposed to networks sticking their heads in the sand.
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That price was too high, though. They, unlike dozens upon dozens of other newspapers, who all get their page one stories from the same two sources (Reuters & AP), they required users to give up information about themselves. And they didn't ask for much. At least, not much less than a bank would ask for when taking out a loan of several hundred thousand dollars.
So let's see here:
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An evaluation of the true costs would be interesting, but probably nearly impossible to calculate as it's too distributed.
Re:This Just In: (Score:5, Interesting)
http://torrentfreak.com/university-uses-utorrent-080306 [torrentfreak.com]Dutch University Uses BitTorrent to Update Workstations
The worst case scenario is when every single users deems uploading to be too costly for their own good and therefore caps it to nothing. In that specific case, bittorrent basically have the same efficency as http or ftp, needing the same amount of dedicated servers and bandwidth. There would be a slight efficency loss due to protocol overhead, but that is minor when dealing with large files.
In most cases however, the upload bandwidth of a peer will be less expensive than that of a dedicated seeder for the simple fact that the peer is idle otherwise, while the dedicated seeder is working at full capacity.
Also, spreading out the distribution costs on the users lessens/removes the need to actually have to charge the users for that same distribution. Even if the users have to pay some/most of that money to the ISP instead, the simple fact is that removing the need for micro transactions is a huge benefit in itself.
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People do seem to throw around words like "efficient" without saying how they're actually measuring it.
One meaning of "efficient" could be the amount of bandwidth, in which case you want to measure t
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well two things. P2P is going to use more bandwith than straight http or FTP due to that whole enforced sharing thing
There is no enforced sharing with bittorrent. Sure, you can get a download faster by trading pieces with other peers, but if you don't you will still get your fair share from the dedicated seeds as well as anyone else who stays on after completing downloading and seeds for a while.
A fair comparison is to compare a distributor using http/ftp with a specific amount of bandwidth with someone using bittorrent with the same amount of bandwidth. In that scenario, those using bittorrent would be able to download
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For non-live video however you can just as easily use the more efficent protocols such as bittorrent. As long as the client balances fetching early pieces with fetching later rarer pieces, the trading mechanism works fine.
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why? well I'll cite an article, yes a bit old, but here is my point, a site where 13 million people download the same 15 MB video... (this is just the most popular my friend!) and Forbes estimates their bandwidth cost at $1 million do
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I don't agree with that... I'm paying for my upload even if I don't use it. I'm not paying more if I spend my whole time torrenting files...
Your ISP pays for the cost initially.
However, your ISP must make a profit or go bankrupt. If the ISP's cost grows, and he doesn't want to go bankrupt (which doesn't serve anyone), then he has the choices: Stop you from using as much bandwidth, get rid of you as a customer, charge more for your account, or charge more for every account. In the end, you pay.
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Given its inefficiency, we're still seeing huge inv
Translation (Score:3, Informative)
Use of BitTorrent - numbers and costs
We can conclude that our experiment with BitTorrent has been a success. Most importantly, according to the comments from our users, this is something you really like. We have read more than 500 comments, and it's the first time we have seen an event with this much publicity get this much positive feedback. We have tried a lot of crazy things on the net: we've had stories on both Digg, Sl
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To put it simply, the cost savings is astronomical, while 'hosting' companies have in the past 'played down' the 'cost savings of bittorrent' saying that with dial-up users etc, that a company would only save 50% of the cost. but the fact that a television broadcaster was able to save a DRASTIC amount of money (41,000 vs 2,000!!!) that's 1/20th the original cost! way better than 50% savings that have been bandied about by people expecting bt to not be a significant savin
Government owned (Score:5, Informative)
DVD sales in parallell with BT distribution (Score:2)
The discussion page on http://nrkbeta.no/last-ned-lars-monsens-nordkalotten-365-gratis-og-i-full-kvalitet/ [nrkbeta.no] (Norwegian only) contains a lot of comments from the NRK people where they answer questions about all kinds of technical details (camera, sw, scaling/de-interlacing from 1080i to 576p, redoing the first episode to improve the quality etc.)
They also explain that the main/only reason they cannot do this with most o
BBC iPlayer (Score:4, Informative)
If you're not putting DRM on, then vanilla BT seems a perfect and ready-made medium. The Beeb, however, sell their programmes around the world, so won't knowingly let unencumbered versions out into the wild.
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Luckily there is one for the house I'm in. Guess I better get a license when I move out. Seems daft to do so, since I haven't owned a tv for years, but there we are.
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Why... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why... (Score:5, Informative)
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Do they have enough upload capacity to deal with the initial "surge" before anyone has enough to seed?
This is usually not a big problem. A single 10mbit/s connection is more than enough for seeding purposes. Even with a 1mbit/s upload that I have, I could managed to seed a full copy of a tv episode in one hour, and a little more than one copy is all that is needed to get it going.
Still, the rest are are all good arguments. There is also the matter of having dedicated seeders that keep older torrents alive. Also, if you have more dedicated seeding, the downloads will go faster for everyone. Just because you
Well duh!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously yer average slashweenie has heard of BitTorrent, and even I would probably mange to be able to find it and install it and make it work if I really wanted to
And how many people's grandmas:
(1) can cope perfectly well with watching a telly programme on a web page in the normal way
(2) wouldn't have the remotest clue what you were on about if you started wittering about BitTorrent?
Re:Well duh!! (Score:5, Informative)
You could probably write a bittorrent client as a flash applet. You press the big, shiny download button that covers half of your screen, and the flash applet connects to peers and starts to download, all with a pretty progress bar. Even my grandfather could figure that out (one of my grandmas can't even use a mouse, the other is paranoid and believes that "They" are spying on her if she use a computer, so she got rid of it).
Or, you could let people download an exe file, that when clicked will automatically launch a simple bittorrent client that automatically opens the torrent file for Nordkalotten 365 and starts to download.
They have thousands of extra dollars that they no longer need to pay Amazon, that they could now throw at the problem. I'm sure they can figure something out.
Re:Well duh!! (Score:4, Informative)
And for those who claim that bitlet is bad because the user is less likely to seed back as much as they take. Having someone not seed back is mostly a problem when dealing with torrents where there aren't any dedicated seeders, in which case torrents eventually will go dead.
For torrents with dedicated seeding like the one mentioned above, that simply isn't a problem. Sure, having peers provide as much as they take is advantageous, but it simply is not vital in that kind of environment. Tit for tat provides enough of an incentive for the peer to atleast provide bandwidth while downloading.
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In the case of watching tv, you could have people seed while they're watching it (after downloading it).
Though the real solution to mass-distribution would use multicast to dramatically lower the amount of data transmitted.
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If you don't forward ports to your machine then BT runs like ass - capping out at 5k/s or less. The average user doesn't know what a port *is* let alone how to forward one.
I absolutely refuse to forward ports to BT for security reasons* (and anyway which one of the 20-odd machines here would I forward to?) so even though I know what BT is I can't use it, because the trackers either refuse to connect completely or refuse to serve data.
* There are only 2 machines on this network t
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If you allow outgoing connections, you can connect to other clients. If you can connect, you can transfer. At any speed. Transfer speeds from other clients is not a problem.
The problem you're describing is a result of the fact that if there's a seed somewhere tha
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TRANSFER SPEED FROM OTHER CLIENTS IS A PROBLEM, in fact.
If you are not sharing (requires open ports for incoming connections) other peers will intentionally throttle you down to almost no bandwidth, as long as there are other peers requesting the same, and sharing, unlike you.
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If you don't want to deal with port forwarding, you should either not expect your users to have full access to the internet or you should avoid using NAT in the first place.
Fi
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Your grandmother is more tech savvy than most then? "They" are spying. "They" are compiling a profile of you through data mining. "They" know more about you than you'd like them to.
Hooray for your grandmother. She "gets it".
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I'm no stranger to forwarding ports. I've done it for vario
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Translated from Norwegian (Score:2)
"If other people are generous enough to give you storage and bandwidth, and you utilize their generosity, then you can save money by using less of your own."
Remarkable!
Next week, a story about uploading video to youtube...
how nice (Score:5, Interesting)
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Unfortunately the majority don't understand this and will fall for it.
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If you're already paying fully for your bandwidth the extra load on your network is already paid for and should be considered sunk cost.
In words you might understand: "The more I download/share, the cheaper my bandwidth becomes"
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Bittorrent has a lot more overhead than HTTP
I keep hearing this a lot. How much overhead? A couple of percentage maybe. That isn't a lot. And the overhead can be reduced by simply lowering the amount of connections you make.
Since theprotocol is very stupid and doesn't take routing into account, the total load on the backbones is also likely to increase.
Umm, the protocol does indeed take routing into account, although indirectly.
It downloads and trades pieces with the peers and seeds that it can get the most out of. And guess which peers that is most likely to be. Of course those near the user himself. And if it isn't, that means that the backbone isn't really overloaded, so it
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Overall costs aren't reduced (in fact they're increased - home users pay far more per gb than a large business user does).
Actually, I pay my monthly fee even if I don't use it, so my current cost per gb is 0. I do pay for upload/download bandwidth, but that I need in any case.
Server bandwidth and cpu have a higher load than the home user computers, meaning that distributing the load to those home users makes efficent use of infrastructure that is already in place.
Unless of course, there isn't infrastructure in place, like in the US.
then bitch when their ISP increases prices/introduces capping/blocks torrents completely.
I bitch when ISPs cap/block torrents because they single out torrents. If they wan't to cap, c
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I assume that you're a capitalist to the core from your silly comment... maybe if you ACTUALLY had faith in the capitalism you seem to represent you'd realize that more efficiency = less cost... all monopoly problems notwithstanding.
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There is no such thing as "unused bandwidth". Even if data isn't being transmitted, the fact that the bandwidth is available immediately for peak demand is important.
This matters even for home users: if you clog my cable connection 24/7 with P2P traffic, my web browsing experience is badly degraded.
A billion posts of Duh (Score:2)
This has to be the most redundant, not-news, article on
It does not contain anything new... no insightful thoughts, different applications, etc.
And the actual cost? (Score:2)
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I would have liked to see an analysis of the actual total distribution cost - not the cost to the originator, but the total.
In the UK, cost of internet data consists of two parts: The cost of getting the data to your ISP, and the cost of getting the data from the ISP to your home, usually using bandwidth bought at wholesale prices from BT (British Telecom). The cost for the ISP to send data to your home is around £0.60 per Gigabyte, But the cost to get data from
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Secondly, did you read the post you replied to? The increase in cost to the ISP is much greater than the saving in cost to the producer. You will pay *more* in increased ISP charges than you could save by reduced movie costs.
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I'll pay the extra $0.02 for each movie/CD/hour of tv I download, vs the cost associated with creating the physical DVD/CD/cable channel and getting it from Mexico/Taiwan/Time Warner to my house.
It isn't $0.02 for each movie. In the UK, most ISPs use the BT (British Telecom) network and buy bandwidth on it to reach end users. With an estimated 66 percent average usage of the available bandwidth, downloads to your home cost the ISP about £0.55 to £0.60 per GB, that would be about $1.10 to $1.20. One 55 minute show that I downloaded from iTMS had a file size of 593 MB, which makes it about £0.33 or $0.66 for that show. The ISP carries that cost, but in the end what you pay every mo
Actual Torrent Files (Score:5, Informative)
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No such thing as a free lunch (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course distributing via BitTorrent is cheaper for the originator, nobody could possibly argue this. But I'd like to see a study on the TOTAL cost to society. In other words, yes it's cheaper for the originator, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. SOMEBODY is paying for all that bandwidth/etc. If you have bandwidth limits, perhaps you are paying for them to distribute their file. If you don't (as we in the US do not) then the telecommunications company is paying. Bandwidth does not materialize out of thin air. SOMEBODY pays. Further, BitTorrent is not exactly efficient. It uses a lot more requests/connections/etc to download or distribute via BT than it does via HTTP/FTP/etc.
The offsetting factor may be the more distributed load over the system, since there's no central point, really. I'm not sure how much this really helps though.
I guess my point is, the total cost to society of BitTorrent use may very well be higher than that for distributing by older methods.
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BitTorrent is not exactly efficient. It uses a lot more requests/connections/etc to download or distribute via BT than it does via HTTP/FTP/etc.
The overhead is relativly minor when dealing with larger files. It is still the best argument. Minimizing the overhead needs to be a goal of an efficent p2p protocol.
SOMEBODY is paying for all that bandwidth/etc.
Yup. However, if any peers deems that paying for the bandwidth isn't worth it, they should turn off their sharing and get everything from the seeders. It will take longer since the distributor is spending less on bandwidth, but eventually he will get it.
If everyone does the same, the distributor has to increase the amount he spends on bandwid
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I can only HOPE that telecos have to pay a LOT of money. It's their stubborn refusal to enable multicast over their internet pipes that has made streaming video/audio and other large file distribution so incredibly expensive in the first place. If not for that, cable and satellite would have died off a decade ago, as IPTV would have been cheaper, and much more
Multicast? (Score:5, Insightful)
- Unicast
- Bittorrent
- Multicast
Multicast is so obviously the best solution all round for the, what, at least 50% of a national TV station's audience that watch predictable and consistent shows week after week. It would be pretty trivial for PCs to grab a multicast overnight.
By the way, the BBC really tried to do this right [bbc.co.uk], but ISPs were too stupid to see that it was in their best interests to cooperate. This is my reading of the evidence - I accept corrections.
It's a plan by the man to stick us with the costs (Score:3, Informative)
My prediction is that some clever Slashdot folks will start claiming that P2P is just an evil trick by the man to stick us with the distribution costs!
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It's certainly cheaper for the central server, but doesn't it just push the workload out to the local machines and network connections? Doesn't it just push the costs to the local user who pays for the bandwidth?
Which is a good thing. Distributing workload to computers that would be idleing otherwise is efficent. Not to mention, that whole thing scales well so that the distributor can deal with a slashdot effect.
There are times I would like my email and web traffic to move a bit faster.
Use local traffic shaping software (like cfos) to shape protocols. ISPs however should stay with shaping the bandwidth per user as their agreement with their users shouldn't be concerning specific traffic. They are internet service providers, not world wide web service providers.
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Which is a good thing. Distributing workload to computers that would be idleing otherwise is efficent. Not to mention, that whole thing scales well so that the distributor can deal with a slashdot effect.
You are not distributing workload to computers. You are distributing the transport of data, and that is most likely not a good thing.
Different pipes have different costs. The pipe that goes from your home to the ISP and back is the most expensive one you can find. A national broadcaster has a much bigger and more cost-effective pipe available. When the BBC started transmitting programs through the internet, ISPs were not much interested in caching the content, because the delivery from BBC to the ISP ha
Re:It's a plan by the man to stick us with the cos (Score:2)
As long as it's something free/gratis, I think most everyone will be happy to go out of their way, wasting a little bit of their upstream bandwidth, in exchange.
Once it starts being commercial content that you either have to pay for directly to unlock it, or have to watch a significant number of commercials, you can expect users to refuse to waste their own b
In the meantime... (Score:2)
Currently I'm working on features to recursively list all of a series' episodes, for example. Then they could be queued or downloaded. We could even parse the date fr
However, this just SHIFTS costs... (Score:3, Insightful)
For a one-off experiment like this, it wasn't a problem. But if you are an ISP dealing with a company like Vuse, who's businsess model is shifting terabytes in this way, it will be a problems.
Not quite (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they didn't. P2P pushes some of the distribution cost from the originator into the network, and I don't see that this is accounted for at all. If things like Oprah-Skype [disruptivetelephony.com] at 242 Gbps become common, it will not be possible to ignore the distributed network costs.
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You need to change BT so it doesn't penalise dowloading before it'll be useful as a distribution mechanism. There are three problems with demanding ratios like this:
1. A lot of (probably most) users are on asymmetric connections - I'm on 8mb down, 832k up. So your 1:1 ratio forcing now limited me to 832k down maximum. I'll use an FTP server at 8mb thanks.
2. Nearly all users are on NAT, which means that they *can't* seed without farting aro
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You need to change BT so it doesn't penalise dowloading before it'll be useful as a distribution mechanism.
No. It doesn't penalize downloading it penalizes leeching. It was actually the first major p2p system with any teeth to its anti-leech measures. The more you contribute the more you get back. The less you contribute the less you get back. It is fair. Ever wonder why those private tracker sites with enforced ratios are so much faster than the other sites?
1. A lot of (probably most) users are on asymmetric connections - I'm on 8mb down, 832k up. So your 1:1 ratio forcing now limited me to 832k down maximum. I'll use an FTP server at 8mb thanks.
So? Go ahead and use the FTP server. The bittorrent swarm is in fact better off without you. You take away from the swarm without giving anything back and
A 100% share ratio requirement is unrealistic (Score:5, Insightful)
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After all the news is not that bittorrent lowers distribution costs. The news is that somebody else figured it out. Some PHB out there somewhere just discovered how he's going to make his quarterly bonus by cutting distribtion costs, and he's got this 'study' that will show him the way.
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The company would get the exact same economic result (all other things being equal) if it charged an amount equal to a percentage of bandwidth costs.