6 ms·

BitTorrent Has More Users Than Netflix and Hulu Combined--and Doubled

38 points by citizenkeys 16y ago

pilif 16y ago
Speaking as a person not living in the US, I'd gladly pay to get to this content legally. Unfortunately that's not possible. Most of the content isn't available and if it is, it's usually only available in a crappy german translation. These artificial barriers should probably be factored in before doing such calculations.
- iwwr 16y ago
  In countries like Germany or France, films are simply doubled. Elsewhere, they are subtitled. However, very few cinemas outside English-speaking countries (none that I know of) actually show the film with no doubles or subtitles (as it's meant to be watched if you speak the language).
  - Goronmon 16y ago
    It's 'dubbed' not 'doubled'.
  - pilif 16y ago
    here in Switzerland, most Cinemas still show the movies in their original languages plus subtitles. That's perfect. I don't mind the subtitles at all in case of english movies and I'm really dependent on them in all other cases (French, Spanish, Japanese mostly) I'm talking about the home video offerings (DVDs, Apple's iTunes store) which often only provide the dubbed versions. Same goes for games by the way, but there, thankfully, there's Steam which actually allows me to play the games in the original language.
- hasenj 16y ago
  > I'd gladly pay to get to this content legally. If I paid 20$ for every episode or movie or show I've ever watched, I'd be in a huge financial crisis -- I would not gladly put myself in that position.
  - charlesdm 16y ago
    Would you pay $20 for a monthly subscription to such a service?
    - hasenj 16y ago
      People pay about that much for usenet servers (giganews, etc). I'm not the kind of person who spends all his time watching TV shows, but if I was, I probably wouldn't mind paying that much for it. But that would be out of convenience, not out of a moral obligation. I've paid for some steam games, but I still download games from bittorrent (even games that are available on steam). I've paid for some games because I wanted to support the developers, and I'm not just talking about indie games here. I paid for Valve games (HL2 series) because I felt they deserve it. I felt like they were nice guys.
      - charlesdm 16y ago
        I'm pretty much the same. I watch one show at the end of the day to relax, but I get them all from bittorrent because they're not available here. A few might be available on digital tv, but for €5 per episode or so. They're usually also a season behind, so I've already seen the episode. That said, I wouldn't mind paying $10-20 per month so that I don't have to both with downloading and tracking what I have and haven't seen. Also, the majority of the people that I know that use BT for movies/shows would pay that.
michaelty 16y ago
Filesharing: It Just Works. Someday, the content providers will understand this and focus on providing a better, cheaper service to their customers.
- lenley 16y ago
  Huh? I'm not sure how you can beat _free_ file sharing services.
  - hasenj 16y ago
    You can, if you make it easy and cheap. Most people don't know what bittorrent is, and even if they know, they wouldn't know how to use it. And even if they knew that, they couldn't tell legit content from viruses.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    Here's the key: you stop selling content, and you start selling something else. It sounds very zen, but it's Steve Jobs' opinion: > "We're going to fight illegal downloading by competing with it," said Jobs. "We're not going to sue it. We're not going to ignore it. We're going to compete with it."
    - chc 16y ago
      But Apple does sell (and rent) content. I'm confused. Jobs' quote even seems to say that — they plan to sell content and sell it well.
      - steveklabnik 16y ago
        Nope, they sell convenience.
  - IChrisI 16y ago
    I buy games on Steam because downloading and installing is a double-click. There are a lot of (admittedly easy) steps when you pirate things, like mounting the ISO and browsing to the crack folder, and re-mounting every time you want to play.
jordanmessina 16y ago
Users are deciding between all of these services? I think it's more like the smart savy (and not so ethical/less well off, if you will) users use all of these services while the better off don't care to shell out the money and not deal with the hassle or just don't even know about the alternative. This is a silly comparison in the first place, BitTorrent isn't just used for television shows/mainstream movies. Of course it's going to have more users...
- hasenj 16y ago
  > and not so ethical Sharing content hardly involves ethics. It's more about economy. EDIT: What I meant is, it's not ethically wrong per se; it's only considered bad because it's bad for the economy in the long run. I wanted to make a point. Defending that point would take essays, which I'm not in the mood to write right now. Refer to RMS's essays: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html The only 'questionable' act involved in sharing is violating copyright. I don't think of that as a crime or even as an ethically questionable act.
  - jordanmessina 16y ago
    Thanks for the edit, I was not looking forward to a huge debate over this topic since it's been discussed to death. We all have our own opinions on what's ethical in this area, it's all very gray.
  - citricsquid 16y ago
    > What I meant is, it's not ethically wrong per se; it's only considered bad because it's bad for the economy in the long run. Not really. It's ethically wrong because the creators and distributors of the content want to charge money for it and by pirating you're refusing to pay for it. If they wanted you to dance for it, or send a photo of you wearing a hat, it would still be ethically wrong to pirate it and there'd be no effect on the economy.
iwwr 16y ago
What is amazing is a service that has comparable numbers of users and bandwidth to the bittorrent network. A river half the size of the Amazon is still a mighty river.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
nollidge 16y ago
That's a completely useless statistic. What's the trend here? Intuitively, the fact that Netflix and Hulu have around half the users of BT seems like good news for streaming providers, since BT's been around for a lot longer.
- chadgeidel 16y ago
  I was kind of thinking the same thing. I would have figured the number would have been more like 10:1 or 20:1 (in favor of bittorrent).
norswap 16y ago
Are we talking about BitTorrent.com or the protocol here ? I'm confused.
ryanwatkins 16y ago
"BitTorrent is available in 52 languages with 'clients checking in from over 220 countries every day.'" Wow, a service available world wide, is twice the size of two that are US-only, one of which is not free. Big surprise.
eli 16y ago
Forget about paid vs ads vs free for a moment. One is a technology that lets people all over the world share many types of files, legal and illegal, versus two US-only services with a limited selection of TV and movies. I fail to see how this is a meaningful statistic in any way. How many "users" does FTP have versus Netflix?
- citricsquid 16y ago
  I pay for video games and I pay for music (my entire library for both is all paid for) but I pirate movies because it's impossible for me to watch them with ease, I'm in England and don't know of any service that lets me pay to stream movies on my PC :(
  - SimonPStevens 16y ago
    I don't get it. Since when is "They don't provide it in the format I want it" a valid excuse for piracy. (Ethical discussions of piracy aside) If you want to download it because that is the format/medium you prefer then download it (from bit torrent or whatever) and then afterwards go and pay for it by buying the DVD even if you never watch it. (If you are going to pirate and claim it's ethical, you need a more reasoned argument for it's validity) (Perhaps technically a grey area yes, but you are saying you are willing to pay, so why not pay?) Perhaps even better would be to download it, and then send a letter + payment to the studio and explain that you wanted to pay for their excellent film but also wanted to download it for convenience. If enough people did this it might encourage them to provide the service you want.
    - citricsquid 16y ago
      oh it's not a valid excuse for piracy, piracy is always wrong but it's an explanation of why I pirate. I do buy films and TV shows when I can (I paid $80 for a boxset of The Wire last week (excellent show btw)) but often I can't find the films I want in store so my choice is to either go without or pirate. I have no problem paying, but the availability is a problem. If there were a service that I could pay for and stream movies when I wanted to and they were available I'd have no problem paying for and using. For example, last week I wanted to watch the latest Season of Dexter which had just finished, I'd have had no problem paying for it but I couldn't, it's not available, so I pirated it.
trotsky 16y ago
Global market vs. north american centric services. Also, there's obviously a lot more going on in the entire bittorrent ecosystem than just video. Considering the respective market sizes, i'm surprised bittorent's total reach isn't 50x. Bittorrent Inc. wasn't trying to make any of those points though, they were just trying to say hey look at how huge our reach is! Except that reach will be considerably diminished as soon as you're taking money (or charging it) to promote some content to your users. Personally, I think P2P is a non-issue in the future of content delivery. Bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper and torrents provide a significantly lower performance and less reliable channel than hosted servers. I am loathe to use torrents even to pirate content, I'll be damned if I want to pay for it and let you abuse my outbound too.
jcl 16y ago
And yet in the U.S. Netflix consumes over twice the bandwidth that Bittorrent does. So either Netflix users use the service a lot more or they download bigger files. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/the-internet-belongs-to-netflix/265 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/the-internet-belongs-to... Is Bittorrent perhaps including in its statistics all the programs that use their protocol to distribute software updates? IIRC, both Steam and World of Warcraft use Bittorrent behind the scenes.
- ryanwatkins 16y ago
  You're comparing Netflix US users against global Bittorrent users. Netflix likely has a large chunk of US users. And likely streams a larger portion of the content in HD.

38 points by citizenkeys 16y ago

pilif 16y ago

Speaking as a person not living in the US, I'd gladly pay to get to this content legally. Unfortunately that's not possible. Most of the content isn't available and if it is, it's usually only available in a crappy german translation. These artificial barriers should probably be factored in before doing such calculations.

iwwr 16y ago
In countries like Germany or France, films are simply doubled. Elsewhere, they are subtitled. However, very few cinemas outside English-speaking countries (none that I know of) actually show the film with no doubles or subtitles (as it's meant to be watched if you speak the language).
- Goronmon 16y ago
  It's 'dubbed' not 'doubled'.
- pilif 16y ago
  here in Switzerland, most Cinemas still show the movies in their original languages plus subtitles. That's perfect. I don't mind the subtitles at all in case of english movies and I'm really dependent on them in all other cases (French, Spanish, Japanese mostly) I'm talking about the home video offerings (DVDs, Apple's iTunes store) which often only provide the dubbed versions. Same goes for games by the way, but there, thankfully, there's Steam which actually allows me to play the games in the original language.
hasenj 16y ago
> I'd gladly pay to get to this content legally. If I paid 20$ for every episode or movie or show I've ever watched, I'd be in a huge financial crisis -- I would not gladly put myself in that position.
- charlesdm 16y ago
  Would you pay $20 for a monthly subscription to such a service?
  - hasenj 16y ago
    People pay about that much for usenet servers (giganews, etc). I'm not the kind of person who spends all his time watching TV shows, but if I was, I probably wouldn't mind paying that much for it. But that would be out of convenience, not out of a moral obligation. I've paid for some steam games, but I still download games from bittorrent (even games that are available on steam). I've paid for some games because I wanted to support the developers, and I'm not just talking about indie games here. I paid for Valve games (HL2 series) because I felt they deserve it. I felt like they were nice guys.
    - charlesdm 16y ago
      I'm pretty much the same. I watch one show at the end of the day to relax, but I get them all from bittorrent because they're not available here. A few might be available on digital tv, but for €5 per episode or so. They're usually also a season behind, so I've already seen the episode. That said, I wouldn't mind paying $10-20 per month so that I don't have to both with downloading and tracking what I have and haven't seen. Also, the majority of the people that I know that use BT for movies/shows would pay that.

michaelty 16y ago

Filesharing: It Just Works. Someday, the content providers will understand this and focus on providing a better, cheaper service to their customers.

lenley 16y ago
Huh? I'm not sure how you can beat _free_ file sharing services.
- hasenj 16y ago
  You can, if you make it easy and cheap. Most people don't know what bittorrent is, and even if they know, they wouldn't know how to use it. And even if they knew that, they couldn't tell legit content from viruses.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Here's the key: you stop selling content, and you start selling something else. It sounds very zen, but it's Steve Jobs' opinion: > "We're going to fight illegal downloading by competing with it," said Jobs. "We're not going to sue it. We're not going to ignore it. We're going to compete with it."
  - chc 16y ago
    But Apple does sell (and rent) content. I'm confused. Jobs' quote even seems to say that — they plan to sell content and sell it well.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      Nope, they sell convenience.
- IChrisI 16y ago
  I buy games on Steam because downloading and installing is a double-click. There are a lot of (admittedly easy) steps when you pirate things, like mounting the ISO and browsing to the crack folder, and re-mounting every time you want to play.

jordanmessina 16y ago

Users are deciding between all of these services? I think it's more like the smart savy (and not so ethical/less well off, if you will) users use all of these services while the better off don't care to shell out the money and not deal with the hassle or just don't even know about the alternative. This is a silly comparison in the first place, BitTorrent isn't just used for television shows/mainstream movies. Of course it's going to have more users...

hasenj 16y ago
> and not so ethical Sharing content hardly involves ethics. It's more about economy. EDIT: What I meant is, it's not ethically wrong per se; it's only considered bad because it's bad for the economy in the long run. I wanted to make a point. Defending that point would take essays, which I'm not in the mood to write right now. Refer to RMS's essays: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html The only 'questionable' act involved in sharing is violating copyright. I don't think of that as a crime or even as an ethically questionable act.
- jordanmessina 16y ago
  Thanks for the edit, I was not looking forward to a huge debate over this topic since it's been discussed to death. We all have our own opinions on what's ethical in this area, it's all very gray.
- citricsquid 16y ago
  > What I meant is, it's not ethically wrong per se; it's only considered bad because it's bad for the economy in the long run. Not really. It's ethically wrong because the creators and distributors of the content want to charge money for it and by pirating you're refusing to pay for it. If they wanted you to dance for it, or send a photo of you wearing a hat, it would still be ethically wrong to pirate it and there'd be no effect on the economy.

iwwr 16y ago

What is amazing is a service that has comparable numbers of users and bandwidth to the bittorrent network. A river half the size of the Amazon is still a mighty river.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

nollidge 16y ago

That's a completely useless statistic. What's the trend here? Intuitively, the fact that Netflix and Hulu have around half the users of BT seems like good news for streaming providers, since BT's been around for a lot longer.

chadgeidel 16y ago
I was kind of thinking the same thing. I would have figured the number would have been more like 10:1 or 20:1 (in favor of bittorrent).

norswap 16y ago

Are we talking about BitTorrent.com or the protocol here ? I'm confused.

ryanwatkins 16y ago

"BitTorrent is available in 52 languages with 'clients checking in from over 220 countries every day.'" Wow, a service available world wide, is twice the size of two that are US-only, one of which is not free. Big surprise.

eli 16y ago

Forget about paid vs ads vs free for a moment. One is a technology that lets people all over the world share many types of files, legal and illegal, versus two US-only services with a limited selection of TV and movies. I fail to see how this is a meaningful statistic in any way. How many "users" does FTP have versus Netflix?

citricsquid 16y ago
I pay for video games and I pay for music (my entire library for both is all paid for) but I pirate movies because it's impossible for me to watch them with ease, I'm in England and don't know of any service that lets me pay to stream movies on my PC :(
- SimonPStevens 16y ago
  I don't get it. Since when is "They don't provide it in the format I want it" a valid excuse for piracy. (Ethical discussions of piracy aside) If you want to download it because that is the format/medium you prefer then download it (from bit torrent or whatever) and then afterwards go and pay for it by buying the DVD even if you never watch it. (If you are going to pirate and claim it's ethical, you need a more reasoned argument for it's validity) (Perhaps technically a grey area yes, but you are saying you are willing to pay, so why not pay?) Perhaps even better would be to download it, and then send a letter + payment to the studio and explain that you wanted to pay for their excellent film but also wanted to download it for convenience. If enough people did this it might encourage them to provide the service you want.
  - citricsquid 16y ago
    oh it's not a valid excuse for piracy, piracy is always wrong but it's an explanation of why I pirate. I do buy films and TV shows when I can (I paid $80 for a boxset of The Wire last week (excellent show btw)) but often I can't find the films I want in store so my choice is to either go without or pirate. I have no problem paying, but the availability is a problem. If there were a service that I could pay for and stream movies when I wanted to and they were available I'd have no problem paying for and using. For example, last week I wanted to watch the latest Season of Dexter which had just finished, I'd have had no problem paying for it but I couldn't, it's not available, so I pirated it.

trotsky 16y ago

Global market vs. north american centric services. Also, there's obviously a lot more going on in the entire bittorrent ecosystem than just video. Considering the respective market sizes, i'm surprised bittorent's total reach isn't 50x. Bittorrent Inc. wasn't trying to make any of those points though, they were just trying to say hey look at how huge our reach is! Except that reach will be considerably diminished as soon as you're taking money (or charging it) to promote some content to your users. Personally, I think P2P is a non-issue in the future of content delivery. Bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper and torrents provide a significantly lower performance and less reliable channel than hosted servers. I am loathe to use torrents even to pirate content, I'll be damned if I want to pay for it and let you abuse my outbound too.

jcl 16y ago

And yet in the U.S. Netflix consumes over twice the bandwidth that Bittorrent does. So either Netflix users use the service a lot more or they download bigger files. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/the-internet-belongs-to-netflix/265 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/the-internet-belongs-to... Is Bittorrent perhaps including in its statistics all the programs that use their protocol to distribute software updates? IIRC, both Steam and World of Warcraft use Bittorrent behind the scenes.

ryanwatkins 16y ago
You're comparing Netflix US users against global Bittorrent users. Netflix likely has a large chunk of US users. And likely streams a larger portion of the content in HD.