5 ms·

> easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in distribution costs For reference, a server in Germany in 2003 had bandwidth prices between €.8 and €2 per gi

• matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Makes me wonder how much unnecessary load these streaming services are placing on global networks. Problems created by copyright. How much cheaper, easier and more efficient would things be if we were allowed to use torrents for media distribution?
  • mindslight 5y ago
    A CDN box at a datacenter or ISP is more efficient than uploading through the last mile, especially if that last mile is a half-duplex shared medium like cable. I'm pro-p2p, pro-home-servers, and pro-piracy, but I don't think it's necessarily more efficient in terms of network load.
    • Retric 5y ago
      Not in comparison to other customers closer than the ISP’s data center. BitTorrent has significant overhead but can scale really well for extremely popular downloads like the latest WoW patch at it’s peak. It’s really hard to beat when your exchanging data with a dozen people in the same apartment complex.
      • mindslight 5y ago
        Only if that apartment complex is wired with ethernet and a local switch [0]. GPON, cable, and DSL would all still go back to the ISP's core, transiting the last mile link twice. There are definitely efficiency gains to be had with decentralized identifiers and distributed systems, but with the centralized nature of the physical Internet they're not always a win. [0] or roommates want the same files and their router supports hairpin NAT or the software uses local segment discovery.
        • Retric 5y ago
          Last mile link twice, but still saves hops on an ISP’s core network as their CDN’s are still generally centralized.
    • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      The network load from P2P is about the same as it is from a very well distributed CDN. In theory the CDN could be a little better, e.g. if the network topology is such that a user uploading to another user on the same segment has to make a round trip through the head end, that will be somewhat less efficient than a CDN box which is already at the head end. But not by a lot. Linearly worse, not polynomially or exponentially worse. And that's assuming the CDN is perfect. That it has a node in every place there are users. Which none of them actually do because the world is really big. Worse, the places without them are the places with the slowest networks in general. If you're using twice as much bandwidth on some 100Gbps piece of fiber in New York City, the users aren't even going to notice that and the ISP can just send more light through the glass. But when there are a hundred users sharing some 40Mbps microwave link in some third world village and all trying to download the same thing, there isn't going to be a CDN node there and only having to suck it through the straw once multiplies the efficiency improvement by the number of users on the far end of the line, which in that case would be a factor of a hundred. Moreover, you can get the efficiency benefit of the CDN by replacing the CDN box with a box in the same place that seeds popular content using a P2P protocol, without losing the efficiency benefits of P2P for the people not near one of those.
      • myself248 5y ago
        Thank you for saying, succinctly and clearly, what I've always figured was the case. However. If the majority of traffic came p2p, then the asymmetry of upload/download bandwidth on shared media like cable modems would start to be a significant issue, wouldn't it? Only on the local segment, but on _every_ such segment. In that case, the seedbox-as-CDN-node route would be a no-brainer for ISPs to install. Are we reinventing the topology of Usenet?
        • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
          Cable connections are typically asymmetric, but the average user doesn't max out their connection 100% of the time. Even if you have a 100 Mbps down 10 Mbps up connection, your average transfer rate might be 5 Mbps because most of the time your connection is idle. Which means you can feed it from peers with an upload cap of 5 Mbps, in theory, if they kept their uplinks saturated all the time. Or an upload cap of 10 Mbps if they all kept their uplinks half saturated all the time. And you can still get 100 Mbps downloads that way by downloading from multiple peers at once, which doesn't change the average transfer rate required from each peer because then twenty people upload at 5 Mbps for 10 seconds instead of one peer having to upload at 5 Mbps for 200 seconds to transfer the same amount of data. But the asymmetric link speed is artificial anyway. There is no technical reason they couldn't make fully symmetric cable modems -- in fact they did so in DOCSIS 4.0, though it's not widely deployed yet. The main reason they're hesitant to offer it is, ironically, that P2P isn't sufficiently widely used. Because then hosting is scarce and people will have the incentive to do high volume hosting on their own connections. Which is bad for the ISP who offers a fast uplink, because they rely on over-subscribing their connections to offer the prices they do. If you give someone a fast uplink, it's quite easy to saturate it 24/7 by serving files to millions of users. So the ISPs don't want to do that. But if P2P distribution was the default then that wouldn't be a problem because nobody would need to do that. You'd upload your thing once or some small number of times and then the users could get it from each other instead of millions of people all trying to get it from the one host. Everyone could have a 100 Mbps uplink and the average upload speed would still equal the average download speed, e.g. 5 Mbps, because that's all you need when the load is evenly distributed.
  • cheschire 5y ago
    Streaming services are, for the most part, optimized to only send you a portion of the file at a time, send you lower bandwidth versions when the throughput drops below a threshold, or in the case of COVID lockdowns everyone temporarily dropped the max resolution of their services because there was a sudden surge in home media streaming. When it comes to video torrents, I suspect a lot of people would start at looking for 4k rips (even if their devices didn't support it), or fall back to standard bluray rips. That's a huge amount of bandwidth when most people probably are fine with DVD or upscaled DVD quality.
    • Aeolun 5y ago
      Hmm, personally I look for 720p. Who needs multiple 100gb files sitting around on their disk.
      • xvector 5y ago
        I spend many thousands on my AV setup so I'm inclined to max it out, even if that requires 100gb+ movies.
        • 55555 5y ago
          Wow you're really into Adult Video!
      • Dylan16807 5y ago
        With reasonable encoding settings, you can get pretty nice 1080p at 2GB/hour. 720p will save what, 40% of that? I don't need space that badly. I haven't really seen much 4k to know how I'll feel about that jump. Though I've definitely seen some split-screen streams where I wished it was 4k.
        • Aeolun 5y ago
          Hmm, anecdotally, 1h at 720p is like 600mb, where 1 hour at 1080p is 2600mb (for me, I assume it depends on encode settings like you say).