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BitTorrent Beefs Up Network Capabilities 164

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the defeating-the-purpose dept.
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."
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BitTorrent Beefs Up Network Capabilities More

BitTorrent Beefs Up Network Capabilities

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  • Now who will I choose... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Super Dave Osbourne ( 688888 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2006 @11:42PM (#15618214)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mr_stinky_britches ( 926212 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2006 @11:44PM (#15618227) Homepage Journal
    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? :/

    • Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @12:32AM (#15618454)
      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:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Mika_Lindman ( 571372 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @01:39AM (#15618757)
        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.

        • 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.

          The real issue here is that BitTorrent is not a particularly efficient way to distribute content. It's a way to "pass the buck" of server hosting costs to the clients, but it's very inefficient.

          For example, let's say that you are downloading a video via BitTorrent. Your computer connects as a peer to other computers that are also downloading the same video. When
          • 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
            • 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.

              Spot on, but that said, most of the binary newsgroups these days are loaded with copyright infringing material too. The ISP's don't tend to care and turn a blind eye to the fact they are hosting this material 'directly'. My ISP for instance offers access to most of these groups and the files therein, albeit with *horrib
          • 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
          • 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.
          • For popular files, with, let's say, an original batch 20-30 seeders that seed at 5mbit or more, bittorrent is MINDNUMBINGLY fast. If you don't max out your up-speed (which would lover your downspeed, since the SYN-ACK packets can't get trough), but limit it to 80% or so, it's basically the fastest way of downloading content, in the world, ever. Assuming that Warner Brothers can put up a 20*50mbit seeders (=1 gbit) plus there are, at any given time, 750+peers, it will take no time at all to download a movie
        • Yeah but there is a lot of us with way more than the average person. I can easily upload at a rate to max out most peoples connection. So if I get enough data to upload, I can take care of 20 people...

          I know this isnt uncommon because a "slow" torrent suddenly goes very fast with only 20 people on it.
      • Maybe in theory, but rarely in practice. The vast vast vast majority of torrents I've been connected to, either the download is superfast and I have to wait for painfully slow upload to even out my ratio, or on the other hand I'm left dead in the water while my upload goes full blast so that every peer can be stuck at 67% just like I am when my upload/download is 600% Of course, once the swarm gets large enough even the limited capacity of home lines should be enough to keep the downloads of new peers goi

    • Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SeaDour ( 704727 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @12:32AM (#15618457) Homepage
      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:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT (Score:5, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @01:05AM (#15618608)
      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.
    • As someone who manages a video hosting site [vobbo.com], I'd agree that 1Gbps wouldn't normally be much at all (at the last NANOG, YouTube mentioned they were doing about 20Gbps). However, for bittorrent style distribution, you split the bandwidth among many peers - the 1Gbps link is mostly for initial torrent downloads and tracker bandwidth, not nearly as demanding as streaming full content.

    • 2Mbps is low?! (Score:3, Informative)

      by dreamlax ( 981973 )
      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 q

  • Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zzesers92 ( 819281 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2006 @11:44PM (#15618228)

    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.
    • 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.

      • Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Firehed ( 942385 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @12:46AM (#15618529) Homepage
        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.

        • Is WB going to force seeding to 100%, charge you extra or ban you from further downloads if you don't?

          If it's regular bittorrent, it would just mean your downloads would be slow. Bittorrent has pretty well eliminated the need to ban people.

          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.

          I'm generally not a fan of widespread media distribution by bittorrent (see my other posts), but IMHO improved infrastructur

      • Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers (Score:5, Interesting)

        by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @01:22AM (#15618673)
        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.

        • "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).
        • I guess you haven't used bitcomet's preview feature.
          If the file is popular and downloading at around 300kb/sec down you can start watching the movie in about 5-10 minutes without any brakes
        • The last is definatly NOT the bottleneck in internet traffic. The only last mile bottleneck that exists is the artificial caps on upload speeds that is there to prevent consumers from being producers.

          The real bottlneck is the lines between the ISPs, and that bottleneck is mostly artifical constructed to keep bandwidth more expensive and valuable. Bittorrent clients will by nature prefer other clients within the same ISP because they can get good speed from them, and will therefore reduce the stress on those
        • Mind telling me where you can deliver multi-gigabyte files for anything close to a nickel?
          That's an order of magnitude less than you would pay an Akamai or other professional content delivery company.
          Price out saturated megabits, figure how many you need for peak load, and tell me where the nickel comes from.

          Bittorrent makes use of the otherwise generally unused upstream found in user broadband connections. With a large
          cloud, users gravitate to exchanging with people to whom they have the best connections

          • Mind telling me where you can deliver multi-gigabyte files for anything close to a nickel? That's an order of magnitude less than you would pay an Akamai or other professional content delivery company.

            First, it remains to be seen whether the files will be multiple gigabytes. A one-hour show downloaded from bittorrent (actually 40 mins after removing commercials) is only 300 megs or so, and that's better quality and higher resolution than the iPod video downloads. I think 1.5 GB is a reasonable estimate,

      • Of course this is why many cable/dsl ISPs are throttling BT or implementing caps on their "unlimited" service. They want to look good saying they are unlimited but in actuality they don't really want to be unlimited. Some people using 200GB a month up and down are costing the ISP more money than the average email user/surfer.
      • The uploading is just using up bandwith that goes idle anyways.

        Sort of. Think of it like a freeway. Your on-ramp might be idle, but it's the traffic flow on the major roads that matters. Nobody, least of all the cable companies, builds a network so that everybody can use 100% of their bandwidth all the time. That'd be like building a highway so that it has as many full lanes as on-ramps.

    • Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers (Score:5, Insightful)

      by x2A ( 858210 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2006 @11:54PM (#15618276)
      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.

      • I don't see anything in the articles about that, but that seems to be the most reasonable way to go. One price for a direct download, and a discount, credit or returned payment for successful uploading the same amount of data. I think this is one way the competing video services can differentiate themselves, in part by quality offered, download speed and cost. Bittorrent is generally limited by the upload speeds of the collective torrenters of a given file, particularly if the seeders are slow.

        I personal
        • "I don't see anything in the articles about that"

          Sorry I don't mean that they are offering this, what I mean is if they didn't take advantage of viewers upload bandwidth, they would have to find this bandwidth elsewhere, which means higher cost... and guess who that higher cost would get passed on to?

          So the choice is pay part cash part bandwidth, or pay more cash. They've figured most people would rather pay less, so have made the choice for you. If there's a market for people who'd rather pay more, I'm sur
        • But they will have a proble finding how much someone uploaded since the bittorrent protocol has non reliable method of discovering that. So in the end lots of people will download at 2Mb/s and upload at 10Kb/s.

          Considering bittorrent has no geographical optimazation using a distribution platform like akamai would probably be cheaper.

          But ofcourse this cooperation is done by the marketing and not by the technicaldepartment (as usual).
          • While bittorrent doesn't optimize by geographical areas automatically, it does so indirectly because clients will trade with those that give them the best speeds which often will be those nearby.

            It would of course also be possible (and pretty simple) to write a tracker that tries to group clients primarly by their geographical location.
    • 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
    • What, you think you weren't paying for distro before? :-/

      Before you were paying for the content with money, and for the distro with money; now you're paying for the content with money and the distro with bandwidth.

    • No.

      Because you get a faster download overall than you would have otherwise gotten, you benefit from them using BT, as does everyone else.

  • What I want to know is (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dowda ( 985441 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2006 @11:45PM (#15618234)
    will this get me porn any faster?

  • Tee-Shirt (Score:3, Funny)

    by jarg0n ( 882275 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2006 @11:46PM (#15618239) Homepage
    If you see da police... Warna-Brother

  • 1GB/Sec (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 )
    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.

  • Duke City Shootout (Score:5, Informative)

    by GMFTatsujin ( 239569 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @12:04AM (#15618315) Homepage
    <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>
  • ...is surely what BitTorrent is all about avoiding. If they need to beef up, they're doing something wrong.

    Probably the thing they're doing wrong is kissing RIAA butt. Generalising: forced monopolies demand centralization, and hence scale horribly.

  • Ehhh... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Psionicist ( 561330 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @12:10AM (#15618340)
    "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.

    • 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?

      Aha... a popular misconception, but BitTorrent is democratic in nature... that is, the more people are interested in it, the more distribution points there are. Since WB TV content isn't really that popular...

    • Re:Ehhh... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Don Negro ( 1069 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @01:30AM (#15618716)
      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.
    • I dare say the pipe will not just be used for tracker information, but to provide the seed as well.

      1G is a decent start and it will be interesting to see what the demand and upload speeds of clients will be. Of course the more popular the content, the larger the swarm will be; so it will largely self regulate.

      The next most logical step is to place seeding servers at strategic locations to service the demand. This way download hotspots can be serviced from local seeding servers and the general swarm,

  • Streaming? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cimmer ( 809369 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @12:22AM (#15618400)
    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
    • BitComet allows the incoming video to be viewed. I guess the download speed has to be above the viewing speed (duh), and I also guess it prioritizes the packets ahead of the viewing point. No doubt this is in the BitComet documentation somewhere.

    • Re:Streaming? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Don Negro ( 1069 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @01:45AM (#15618778)
      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.

    • Streaming is a synonym for downloading if it's multimedia and you're tech-challenged.

      • Technically streaming is a kind of dowloading, but with severe limitations on how, since the content is displayed as the data comes in, there must be a buffer, and the file must be downloaded somewhat linearly. at least until the buffer get obscenely huge, but if the download ever does get significantly ahead of the current position, it's fast enough that there's no real need to accelerate further.
      • "Streaming is a synonym for downloading if it's multimedia and you're tech-challenged."

        Could you provide some reference materials? I've never heard of streaming media being referred to as a synonym for downloadable media and I'd be interested to know if I've really had my head in the sand or if you are just being a troll. Here are a few references pulled from a quick Google search.

        http://www.clickandgovideo.ac.uk/Glossary.htm#S [clickandgovideo.ac.uk]
        streaming: Process of sending media over the Internet or other network,

        • I know what streaming is. I guess I didn't make it clear enough; the person that wrote the article doesn't necessarily know what streaming is. When you talk to the average computer-(semi/il)literate person, if they say streaming the best you can be sure of is that they're saying "downloading media".

  • Solution looking for a problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @12:27AM (#15618428) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • 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....

    • Actually, it's a solution for a real problem. Just not the problem they seem to be trying to address. This sort of thing would be great for cable TV companies wanting to offer VoD. Each cable box could have 300GB or so local cache. If you want something popular, the odds are that one of your neighbours already has it, so you can stream it from them. Since you are all on a bus network for the last hop, your downloading it from them places no more strain on any part of the network than getting it from an
  • The future really is an aggregating network like bittorrent, not physical media. You'll have 1 terrabyte cell phones aggregating content all day to be played back on PC's throgh a local wireless connection to the cell phone.

    Unfortunately download services have been bulletproof on content protection. If anyone ever breaks into cinemanow, they can change the keys, which they can't do completely even with blu's millions of keys. That's going to keep it expensive.

  • I'd be really excited about this, if... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by screeble ( 664005 ) <jnfuller@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @12:57AM (#15618573)
    .. 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.

    • 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

  • how will that be handled?

    will it be a lease based system or will it be a pay to "own" kinda system?

    something tells me the format will be WMV, as it allows more flexible styles of DRM...
    • Warner Brothers has announced a payment plan; it seems quite reasonable, and should help to stem the tide of illegal movie downloading.

      $1.95/per min for the first five minutes, and $5.95 for each additional minute!*

      *newer/popular titles may not fall under this pricing plan.
  • Remember that net neutrality amendment that the US House just shot down?

    Thanks Bittorrent for giving the telcos ammo to use against net neutrality when it goes to the Senate.

  • It's great, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by metroplex ( 883298 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @02:05AM (#15618880) Homepage
    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.
  • Here's a link to the "for print" version [extremetech.com] which only has a couple of ads and saves you having to click through multiple pages.

  • reward system (Score:3, Interesting)

    by john_uy ( 187459 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @07:41AM (#15619790)
    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.
  • 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 th

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