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I just installed Diablo III, most of which was delivered to me via BitTorrent. It worked pretty great. In theory, Apple et al could also use BT to distribute m
by ender7 14y ago
I just installed Diablo III, most of which was delivered to me via BitTorrent. It worked pretty great.
In theory, Apple et al could also use BT to distribute movies, yes? Have iTunes run a modified BT client that only connects to other approved clients?
- oskarth 14y agoThere are some somewhat big, and most importantly legal, actors that do this already for music :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Technical_information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Technical_information
- libraryatnight 14y agoIf there were a TV network sponsored torrent site with a monthly subscription, and no DRM, I would throw my money at them so fast. I doubt this will happen, though.
- periferral 14y agoDRM or not, this seems like a great way to distribute content.
- rmc 14y agoBitTorrent is a great technical advancement. It's a fantastic, brilliant, genius new invention that makes it much much easier to share data. It, paradoxically, gets faster the more people who want to download! It's a brilliant technical solution to a big, pressing, expensive problem. I am annoyed when such a marvelous technical solution is seen as nothing more than a shady, illegal software. ☹
- biot 14y agoBitTorrent is like a lock pick set. There are valid uses such as if you've locked yourself out of your house, but if the majority of people use a lock pick set to unlock the back door to a movie theater and sneak in to watch movies without paying no doubt it would be perceived similarly.
- moe 14y agoBad analogies are like Vietnam.
- artursapek 14y agoBitTorrent is a pawn shop that sometimes sells guns to criminals. A lock pick set is more like a keygen, to go with the gun. (You know, as long as we're speaking in analogies)
- mjwalshe 14y agomostly sells guns - I suspect the ratio of dodgy/legit is worse for bittorrent that the average pawn shopp
- primatology 14y agoThat's not entirely valid. There is _one_ legitimate use for a lock pick set: to unlock something you own that you've accidentally locked yourself out of. There are literally billions of uses for BT: every large public (legal) file that's currently distributed via centralized server.
- aplusbi 14y agoAre you not familiar with Locksport?
- derleth 14y agoNo and neither is anyone else, statistically speaking. (Personally I know exactly what you're talking about, but trying to hang your case on an obscure sport isn't doing it any favors. The lockpick analogy is bad and a car analogy would serve you much better.)
- aplusbi 14y agoNot my analogy, and I agree it was terrible.
- daenz 14y agoIt is a great way to distribute content. It more or less scales the delivery network in step with the number of content consumers. There's also an interesting economic to torrents...the crappier the content, the fewer people seed. The fewer people that seed, the harder it is to get and the longer it takes. On the flip side, really great content gets seeded like crazy, and everyone can enjoy it quickly.
- PuercoPop 14y agoAlthough I agree with your post in general terms, I want to highlight is not great content gets seeded, its popular content. There is a diference. Specially since great old content decreases in popularity.
- daenz 14y agoIt's both. Great content and popular content both get seeded quite a bit, even as they age.
- wisty 14y agoI've heard that popular content gets lots of leaches, but they don't seed for long. They delete the file once they've watched it, because it just wasn't that good. Good content gets a lot of seeders, because they keep it for longer.
- hmottestad 14y agoWell. NRK (Norwegian national tv broadcast service) puts a lot of its content online. Since they don't have the bandwidth to handle the large spikes in activity, they publish a lot of this content as torrents. http://video.nrkbeta.no/torrents/ http://video.nrkbeta.no/torrents/
- rvkennedy 14y agoI think BBC iPlayer uses torrents internally to deliver its programmes. There's DRM, but it's not very restrictive. I throw my money at them once a year.
- pbhjpbhj 14y agoWell twice-ish as you pay them once via the Exchequer and once via TV Licensing. How is their DRM "not very restrictive" unless you mean you can download DRM free if you can afford an iPhone (I think that's still true?). You can watch shows for 1 week before they're locked, can't you. But yes last time I used it they installed a hidden application called Kontiki that there's practically no control over that leeches bandwidth without asking.
- gcb 14y agoDoes valve publish it's bittorrent support anywhere? besides hiring the guy? i mean, one would think responsible news outlets (are there any?) would request valves comment everytime they publish the RIAA side, since valve profits buckets from it.
- MartinCron 14y agoI've often thought that Podcasts should be distributed over BitTorrent. Every so often Ira Glass comes on the This American Life podcast and mentions that it costs over $100K a year (or whatever) for just the bandwidth of hosting the podcast. This isn't to say that you shouldn't give directly to support your favorite public radio shows and/or your local public radio station, naturally.
- wmf 14y agoPeople have been putting torrent links in their RSS for years.
- MartinCron 14y agoYes, but it isn't particularly widespread, I checked the RSS for a few of my favorite podcasts and they don't have them. I also checked to see if any of my favorite podcast players support torrent downloads and they don't appear to.
- Drbble 14y agoCouldn't he put the file in Dropbox or Google docs get free downloads?
- adduc 14y agoBoth sites have a Terms of Service that prevent the misuse of their resources. If you've ever clicked on a popular link to a file on Dropbox's servers, you may find a page that tells you "This file has reached its daily limit of downloads" or something along those means. Google likely has something similar with Google Drive.
- legulere 14y agoThere are two problems with it: First you have to create the possibility for the people to download your podcast as a torrent. This sounds easy but is additional work. A new project that wants to tackle this is http://bitlove.org/ http://bitlove.org/ where podcasters just have to add their regular feed and the site will create a bittorrent feed and seed the torrents (extensive German descrpition: http://metaebene.me/2012/05/06/bitlove/ http://metaebene.me/2012/05/06/bitlove/) The other problem is that users need to be able to easily download the torrent feeds. Some bittorrent clients support feeds, but right now only one podcast client understands bittorrent: http://http://www.getmiro.com/ http://http://www.getmiro.com/
- kschults 14y agoDid you check the actual numbers on that? I was impressed with the speeds I was getting, and figured it must be because they were using a P2P mechanism, but when I looked at the download statistics (in the downloader, there's an option to show network information), and was very surprised that it was almost entirely directly downloaded. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something on the order of 1-2% of the total download. That said, as someone else alluded to, maintaining that CDN with that bandwidth is probably crushingly expensive, and is something only Blizzard and a few others could pull off.
- shin_lao 14y agoBlizzard is a known BitTorrent user. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28protocol%29#Software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28protocol%29#Softw...
- frio 14y agoYes -- and no. You have to remember that outside of a few countries, unlimited internet isn't ubiquitous. Admittedly, NZ is basically a worst-case scenario (we're connected to the rest of the world by a single pipe, access to which is - was - priced expensively), and we've recently seen an explosion of data caps ($130 for 550GiB from one provider, now), but that's only a very recent development. Some ISPs charge up to $2 a GiB - still. So, using BT and seeding becomes a less valid option. Still, I'll happily admit that things are changing, and if NZ is a yardstick of the bad, then BT as a distribution mechanism (backed by, say, Akamai or other CDNs) for legal content could definitely take off.
- uggedal 14y agoWoulden't bittorrent be beneficial in NZ for popular torrents since not everybody needs to download the entire content through the Southern Cross Cable but instead could download some from local NZ peers?
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