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They should have picked one single niche application for BitTorrent and built a killer product around that.
by api 10y ago
They should have picked one single niche application for BitTorrent and built a killer product around that.
- criddell 10y agoIsn't that what ThePirateBay.org did?
- sp332 10y agoThey didn't really try to control the protocol development like BitTorrent did though. They didn't even have their own client.
- wmf 10y agoIt sounds like they tried that multiple times and they all failed.
- api 10y agoI'm not sure about that. A lot of what I've read about sounds like they were chasing Netflix with a lot of cash but no idea how to compete. The article mentions that big cos are using BitTorrent for cluster upgrades. There's a lot of cash in enterprise networking. BitTorrent is basically a large blob multicast protocol. BitTorrent Sync was a decent product too. What would have happened had they put $30 mil behind a push to take sync from Dropbox and Box instead of sidelining it? Seems like they spun out the best contender they had. It'd be funny if the spinoff succeeds.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoIt could be the classic situation of FOSS. They had a product people would've paid for if sold on its advantages. They gave it away for free. It got picked up by tons of freeloaders. With free version out & good enough, they weren't able to figure out how to make money off it. Messed themselves up.
- eumoria 10y agopiracy aside PopcornTime showed how powerful P2P can be for media distribution... some kind of sync application could've been it
- Crespyl 10y agoUpdaters/patchers for some popular games (Blizzard stuff, League of Legends, etc.) use P2P methods to reduce hosting requirements when pushing big updates to hundreds of thousands/millions of players. I'm sure there's other use cases, but I'm not sure what they'd be.
- eumoria 10y agoyea Blizzard jumped on that train a while ago I'm sure it relieves them of so much load
- grogenaut 10y agoI can't find the link right now but I believe blizzard disabled p2p over a year ago.
- jedberg 10y agoNetflix and Facebook use P2P internally for large file distribution. The big issue with P2P publicly is privacy. A lot of people don't want other people to know what they are doing. Imagine for example youtube, or worse pornhub, using P2P.
- orasis 10y agoPeer-to-peer only ever made sense for popular stuff that people won't pay for. By definition there is little business opportunity in markets where people don't want to pay.
- EthanHeilman 10y ago>By definition there is little business opportunity in markets where people don't want to pay. Counterexample: network TV, radio, facebook.com, gmail.com, pretty much all of the ad-supported web. >Peer-to-peer only ever made sense for popular stuff that people won't pay for. Counterexample: Skype (freeium model on a P2P network). The content wasn't "popular" it was private phone conversations and people paid for it. Counterexample: Bitcoin (runs on a P2P network). People pay fees to miners so that the network relays their transactions. Counterexample: The internet. A giant P2P inter-network with all sorts of different business relationships. Many of which involve paying someone to send a packet that is only meaningful to a particular party.
- orasis 10y agoin most of those examples people are paying by watching ads.
- rhcom2 10y agoI remember Blizzard using peer-to-peer to update their games. Any large download shared by many people could be a good use case.
- kalleboo 10y agoFor a long time, Spotify used P2P to distribute music, and Skype used P2P to break through NAT. Both of those dropped it though.
- zigzigzag 10y agoYeah. The article is like "everyone at BitTorrent Inc said Cohen is brilliant, so he's brilliant". BitTorrent is a shit way to move files that only makes sense if your users are willing to subsidise your bandwidth for you. If you look at how big files are moved on the net in practice it's all professional CDNs. BitTorrent is hardly used outside piracy.