3 ms·
This is, as always, the elephant in the room. A lot of people are seeing their internet use throttled for certain services lately, so even the supposedly "simp
by skore 13y ago
This is, as always, the elephant in the room.
A lot of people are seeing their internet use throttled for certain services lately, so even the supposedly "simple and fast" alternatives are taking a beating in the race these days.
(Bittorrent) P2P technology is a marvel to me. It's such a simple concept and the recent advances at distributed links, encrypting and/or obfuscating the traffic etc. have done a good job keeping up with attempts at limiting it. It's fast, takes little effort to use and makes incredible use of the resources that the internet offers while being more true to its core values (fault tolerance, distributed data, "route around censorship" etc.).
If you want to (and have a modern connection), you can find TV Shows in high definition shortly after their original broadcast, with zero advertisement interruptions and at download speeds that vastly exceed realtime streaming. Even in the rare cases where you cannot stream what you have downloaded so far (because of early missing chunks), simply waiting a minute or two will usually do the trick. What I would call the "inconvenience level" is down to where the time you need to wait for your content to be ready is about what you need for getting a round of snacks. Ergo: Virtually Zero.
A content consumer like myself, in particular using a GNU+Linux system, is receiving vastly superior service at pretty much zero cost (save for effort and internet fees). Not to mention that for a content publisher, bittorrent is a mindblowingly simple and cost effective tool.
For a while, I was actually considering moving away from my usual routine of "watch first, buy properly (in disc form) later". With all the BS they are still attempting to shovel into those, however (in particular the recent net-neutrality and surveillance crap), I find it harder and harder to ease up on my stance.
In my opinion they should burn it all down, put it on bittorrent and charge in crypto money. Pretty sure we will be moving to some form of that eventually, might as well get it over with before we have to endure even more collateral damage from outdated monopolies trying a little too hard having it their way.
- ctdonath 13y agosave for effort Aye, there's the rub.
- Kluny 13y agoTo me, it seems like the easiest thing in the world go to the the Pirate Bay, look something up, click "Get this torrent" and wait ten minutes or so for it to show up. Then I tried teaching someone who's not tech savvy to do it. She didn't have adblock, so she was confused by the Russian wives for sale and by the multiple Download buttons. She was deeply suspicious of having to download uTorrent and completely lost as to how to choose which of several available torrents she should pick. I don't know. I try to use Netflix on someone's Xbox and have the exact same problem. How the hell am I supposed to navigate with a joystick? Is it A or B to select? How do I go back? Maybe we're all just getting old.
- rayiner 13y agoCalling the media companies "outdated monopolies" is the height of absurdity. It's ridiculously easy to compete with the media companies: just film in digital, process in digital, and put up content on P2P and charge in Bitcoin. There is nothing stopping you from doing that today.
- pessimizer 13y agoYou have to notify people that your thing exists, and multibillion dollar ad budgets crowd independent media out, no matter what the quality. The media industry is no longer designed for more than a handful of massive vertically integrated companies to operate, because there's only a handful of massive vertically integrated companies that operate the media under a thousand different names. It may sound quaint, but production costs used to be the big hurdle to creating and distributing an independent work. As production costs approach zero, collusion and M&A have risen in a complementary manner to compensate.
- rayiner 13y agoGoogle, Facebook, Twitter? Advertisement is more accessible than ever.