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Hollywood Looks to BitTorrent for Distribution
daria42 writes "Vinton Cerf, who wrote the original TCP/IP protocol and is currently chairman of ICANN, said this week he had recently discussed BitTorrent with at least two interested movie producers. 'I know personally for a fact that various members of the movie industry are really getting interested in how to use the Internet--even BitTorrent--as a distributed method for distributing content,' Cerf said. 'I've spoken with several movie producers in the last month.'"
The thing is, if any movie producers/directors decided to distribute their works over the internet, they might not be able(allowed) to go on big screen anymore.
So any promising producers might not take up the offers, and those less-promising ones might only attract a lower level of interested audience.
We have seen few success stories in online music distribution by bands, but the mainstream still hasn't moved yet.
Having said that, anything has to start somewhere.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
The MPAA has done 180s before when it comes to tech, look at their complete change of face on the VCR and video industry after the famed surpreme court case.
Why not? A topic of discussion before, how about movie theaters participating in a p2p "theater only" version of bittorrent? They could efficiently distribute large digital film content in an economical manner.... Wouldn't this help legitimize the whole p2p debate?
Is anyone concerned that MP/RIAA would want to know their "enemy" better in order to discover its weaknesses and close it down more effectively? I can picture the discussion with Mr Cerf, and the movie guy is nodding and taking notes furiously, saying, "yes, do go on".
It's the same reason some men read Cosmo magazine- it's like getting behind the lines and into the mind of the adversary.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
The net in general has been around for quite some time; much of which the music and film industries has met it with open hostility. In particular P2P applications thus far has met with nothing but legal hostility. That said, I am suspicious this is but a ploy to lure out some of the application authors to be crucified at a later date.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
This would be terrific for showing that bittorrent is worthwile for small and large business models in which legal content is served. In Canada, one major cable ISP, Shaw, uses traffic shaping to heavily throttle bittorrent since they see it as a tool for pirates, but more mainstream uses of bittorrent would put pressure on Shaw to ease up on the throttling.
Well, I don't know about you. I think BitTorrent is very cool and has it's uses, especially amongst those who don't have multiple redundant fiber connections. But when game companies (Blizzard for example) and movie companies start to distribute their wares by way of BitTorrent, that makes me wonder.
Now I myself don't pay by volume, but I do know some who do! Are we supposed to pay for their wares, and then we get to download, sometimes slowly because BitTorrent downgrades users that don't share because of closed ports/firewalls etc.
We pay them, but we have to distribute it for them?!
Big companies, who probably have big a** internet connections themselves, should make their wares available for direct download by standard HTTP and/or FTP...
Well, maybe that's just me.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Take a look at my journal for my idea on how BT could work for TV networks.
Partially OT, but some of the ideas would fit a movie distribution model as well.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
All you have to do is read ONE cosmo. After they are all the same stories over and over.
There is a big difference between closing bittorrent sites that act as trackers for pirated materials and using the bittorrent protocol for distributing MPAA's approved legal content. Just the same as Blizzard using bittorrent to seed patches for World of Warcraft while not condoning piracy of their software over bittorrent.
It would be beneficial if the MPAA, RIAA or others embraced using p2p such as bittorrent because it helps to legitimize p2p. This doesn't mean protection for pirates, but it does mean protection for the protocol (i.e. we won't see legislation forcing it to be killed at the ISP level).
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Yeh and they'll be using Gnutella to distribute the .torrents ;-)
Why don't they let everyone download an encrypted file, share it in anyway they like.
You go to a website and download a key to decrypt, a one time key specifically for your movie player, via challenge response.
Of course it will be cracked, everything is, but it will serve as DRM and most people will do good if given the option.
Just change the algorythm on a per film basis.
Then people could swap stuff and pay to view.
technocrat.net
...but I am too apathetic to look for it. What follows is no troll. I swear.
My first reaction to this and the article was, "what amount of crack is being smoked now and by whom?"
My second reaction was, "this is par for the opportunistic and predatory but too stupid to live course."
Once again, late to the party and like the worst newbie's granddad, going "ooohh, what's this I hear about this inter thing?" Anyone remember their take on the VCR for years and years? It was the money people reacting to the new dynamics of the entertainment market with the entrenchment of the VCR that led to the end of all crap straight to the first run cinemas theme of the 70s and beginning of the straight to video with those what were we thinking mistakes theme of the 80s on.
I think the experienced net-going public's desire to adopt a DRM-ified torrent system is about like their desire to see a musical version of Trainspotting starring Andy Dick. We know that DRM is going to be the first thought on their minds. I think we can also see some sort of iTunes-like pruveyor appearing and it being half-assed to start, broken repeatedly, the IP providers getting stern and filing lawsuits, and the system progressing to some sort of bastard offspring of Tivo and BitTorrent.
No thanks. They still don't get it? Indeed.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
So let me get this straight, the movie companies get to piggyback off of their customer's bandwidth to take a chunk out of their expenses? I can see the sense of community when its free stuff being distributed, but for DRM'd files and when you know someone is getting a profit, I'd think the sense of community that is normally associated with BitTorrent will vanish.
There has to be incentive for a person to use their internet connection to help out a publisher. Whether it be credit, cash, or free services, there has to be something there to make people want to seed.
One of the biggest issues with BitTorrent is the leeches that don't leave their torrents uploading after they are done downloading. I would expect this to increase greatly if the files being downloaded are DRM'ed and paid for, because less people would feel a sense of community or otherwise see a reason not to leech. This problem could well be minimized by the software (perhaps integrate the downloader and the player, or put the downloader in a background daemon), and if it was done in a way that is not too intrusive on bandwidth it would be accepted by the mass majority of users, assuming they didn't know what was going on and didn't care (eg, not /. geeks).
Nevertheless, considering most consumer broadband connections have shit for upstream bandwidth, it would be challenging to make the bandwidth hit unnoticeable. Can it be done? Sure. But it is going to require a company that has some real attention to detail and understands the importance of quality in software. Remember, this needs to be of at least of comparable quality to NetFlix to get the early adopters to reach critical mass, and NetFlix has the bandwidth of the USPS on their side.
The thing most people dont realise which is a contributing factor to this success is that a music video is basically an advertisement for a band. By distributing your ad to people who are intelligent enough to comprehend BT, and not the near-illiterate common denominator of MTV, you might actually succeed in reaching people who are not only jaded enough to know when something is bad, but jaded enough to realise that something is good.
(Disclaimer: Note that if you disagree with anything I just said, you're probably right. I'm really not one to argue. I'm more one to ramble.)
Oh, that and MTV just plain sucks. Those of us interested in something new/original frequently avoid MTV stuff, because most of it lacks originality. Hell, everything I hear on the radio is just a rehash of everything I heard a year ago on the same station. Different name, same sound.
SRSLY.
Yeah, but this one was totally predictable. Overloaded servers and bandwidth limitations have been THE obstacle to growth for internet media. BT and its ilk solve those problems nicely. But these would-be distributors going to have to convince the ISPs to give consumers synchronous bandwidth to really make this scheme work effectively.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I see no contradiction.
If Hollywood chooses to use BitTorrent to distribute films (legally) but fights to shut down illegal distribution (via BitTorrent) this is no different from it distributing films by video and shutting down video pirates.
BitTorrent is a technology, not a legal or moral imperative.
You want to sue people over the use of peer-to-peer applications, but at the same time monopolize on it's popularity?
Until I can legally download & burn a movie cheaper than going to blockbuster and doing the same, forget it.
I'll point out that the Decemberists have really excellent performance and songwriting on their side. Not just BitTorrent :)
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Closing down BitTorrent sites has nothing to do
with "one hand not knowing what the other is
doing."
That is like saying police seizing illegal guns
is a case of "one hand doesn't know what the
other is doing." Just because they are going
after the illegal portion doesn't mean that there are not legal ways.
The fact that BitTorrent sites are so popular
for downloading illegal movies shows that they
could be popular for downloading legal (DRM'd
of course)movies.
On the one hand they're trying to convince the United States Supreme Court that the developers of a technology can be sued into oblivion if at any point the technology is mostly used for copyright infringement.
On the other hand, they want to use it themselves. That's going to take some tricky wording.
Anyone remember the Lazarus Long line about how no sane adult wants justice, but it's what we're willing to settle for?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
This applies to the ??AA and those men you mention who read Cosmo: You won't get anywhere until you stop treating those you are trying to understand as adversaries.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Not exactly a cheap date anymore.
Meet her inside and save 10USD.
I personally do not see why going together to a movie should even count as a date. Go to a nice non fast-food restaurant and actually talk to each other.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It would be beneficial if the MPAA, RIAA or others embraced using p2p such as bittorrent because it helps to legitimize p2p. This doesn't mean protection for pirates
Actually, it could. Part of the problem with BitTorrent is the fact that downloading necessitates uploading - so even if you have a legal right to obtain a copy of something, in order to do it, you have to upload to other users (who may or may not have the right to have it). By embracing BitTorrent as a protocol, they're removing one of the possible objections - namely, they can't claim that a person downloading something from BitTorrent illegally is committing copyright infringement thousands of times - just once.
(Of course, this presumes that they won't recognize this problem and build it into some license agreement crap thing, which they probably will. It also doesn't avoid the objection that just because I have a legal license to one copy of a copyrighted work, and a fair right to make one copy of that copy, doesn't give me the right to make a copy of a different copy.)
Meet her inside and save 10USD.
And lose any chance of a second date...
I personally do not see why going together to a movie should even count as a date.
It doesn't. No one just goes to a movie for a real date.
Ever heard of "dinner and a movie"?
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
I have a problem with BitTorrent being used to distribute content that I'm paying for. While I agree that movies and television shows should be legally available for download, they people supplying the content should pay for bandwidth.
:)
If I use BitTorrent, I'm using my own bandwidth to help them redistribute/resell the exact same content that I just paid for.
Because of this, any content distributed over torrents should be discounted accordingly.
I believe that torrents work right now because their content is recieved for free. There is a sentiment of community. You can only get a file because other people seeded it. So in kind, people continue to seed the files to return to favor. That's what makes it work.
If I'm paying $10 for a movie, I wouldn't count on me spending anytime seeding it. I've paid for it. I don't owe the community anything.
If that makes any sense...
Comparing FTP with Bittorrent is like comparing apples and oranges. And even that is even too modest to apply for your analysis of FTP and Bittorrent.
:-( Though if someone would be willing to attack the aforementioned problem that would be great!
For starters, you cannot extrapolate that FTP is surperior to Bittorrent simply because you have experienced surperior transfer rates with FTP over bittorrent. You have to ask yourself, what kind of speeds would you get if the FTP site that you are transfering from were to be the seed a particular torrent, and that it was only seeding the file to a few clients.
Reversely, you also have to ask yourself what kind of performance you would get from each of those individual "ips" that you were connected with as peers when you were using bittorrent if they all ran FTP servers for you connect to?
Your arguments for claiming "bittorrent" not living up to the hype is not justified and poorly formed. Can I answer the questions that I posed? Not unless I do the exact same thing.
One thing can do is to perform a simple test of using clients such as Download Accelerator or GetRight, or Xi's NetworkConnect to purposely connect multiple times to a single URL but spread out the download. Observe the speed that you obtain by a single download stream vs the aggregate download streams of connecting multiple times to the same file. Most likely you would see that you obtained a much higher aggregate throughput when you hammered it in multiple streams.
Bittorrent is simliar in that it is attaching itself to multiple nodes in obtaining the single goal of a file. The problem what you may have experienced is perhaps the 'torrents' you are trying to acquire are not being seeded by sites that have a lot of through put and the clients that are part of that swarm are not very 'upload' friendly. Just because you see 150 peers that does not mean you have access to all 150 of those peers. Individually those peers can have different settings, and like most people, they probably tuend their bittorrent clients to not to occupy their entire upload stream and maybe with a maximum number of upload streams set to 2-4. With all these constraints in place, you cannot just plainly say that Bittorent sucks because if those 150 peers allowed for unlimited upload sreams with unlimited capacity to the best of their ability, I would safely say that you would much better performance than a single stream of a FTP.
Your argument for not setting the MTU or TCP windowing to optimize your other application to INCLUDE bittorrent is not justified. "Optimizing" in itself is to make compromises so that the available resources are utilized to the best of the abilities by those consume it. The fact that you don't want to include bittorrent in your suite of application is not optimizing at all. If you find a suitable MTU or TCP windowing setting that works for not just bittorrent but your "other" suite of application, that is truly optimizing. Simply ignoring it or even attacking the problem is not the best solution. Maybe the new settings will affect the other applications in some manner. But do you really need to optimize Gopher protocol? or telnet? if these were application protocols that somehow that took a hit? You don't know that, and I don't know that. Do you even know that FTP and SFTP would be affected?
Also, you claim that you can achieve speeds of 400KBps on your ftp download. This would mean that your ftp site has an upload capacity of at least 3.2768Mbps. With overhead, let's just say it has about 4Mbps. Last I checked, I have not seen many residential dsl or cable provider(s) that offer services that include a 4Mbps upload.
And no. I don't know what I am talking about because I don't have any certs. No CCNA, CCNP, or CCIE.
Anyone else have something to add to this? After all, I could be and probably wrong...
My problem with this argument though is that content production prices will not approach zero. Or it shouldn't. You need a decent crew and if you ask me high end sourcing to really compete with the giant videos. Even a format like HDV is just not good enough in my opinion.
Half the budget on this video went to sourcing on film and the steps necessary in post production to produce a high end format ready for broadcast. The other half went on traditional expenses like costuming, food, location lockdown. Everyone worked for free. But we can't ask the same people to work for free on the next one.
The reason so many amazing videos came out of commissions from the UK in the 90s (all those Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Chris Cunningham pieces or say all of Radiohead's videos) is due to the mid budget video - something we don't really have in the US anymore. Now it's either the $5 million budgeted video, or the $10k video.
The problem is in the low budget, indie music world that there isn't really a point to making a video; which I as someone who wants to get jobs making videos understands. Every video is a gamble in the hopes of making it to rotation on MTV. That's a fact.
But the push from MTV is dependent on its playlist and brand attitude. Currently MTV2 decided to change and become another whole network and focus on major label pop punk and hip hop. For the most part all other music gets shunted to one hour a week timeslots. The other push is that there's some weird unwritten rule that a music video must contain primarily performance footage.
Result being - creative stagnation. And the bands who could make really interesting videos not having enough money to go to town when they realize how limited their distribution options are.
I'm hoping more people pick up the bittorrent torch and run with it and it leads to a blossoming of creativity in music videos. Artists who don't have the tools of a major label should add this to their arsenal.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
the contradiction comes from their attempts to paint the technology as inherently bad. They are the ones who are claiming peer to peer networks have no legitimate uses and are exclusively for illegal distribution of copyrighted materials.
Yeah whatever. The RIAA didn't make up the term. It's been used for well over 25 years in the software community to refer to acts of digital copyright infringement. Hell, plenty of "warez" groups have played up the pirate theme.
Saying that something isn't illegal when it is by current law is just stupid. Copyright infringement is illegal under US law and most other countries. Stating that does not mean I agree with the RIAAs actions or the law itself.
P2P is not a protocol, it's a term used that covers a number of protocols. Bittorent does need protection, or rather needs to be shown as a legitimate (i.e. has significant non-infringing usage) just as much as the VCR did in the '80s. Why? Because the RIAA and MPAA etc. have been trying to make P2P protocols and applications made illegal. Showing significant non-infringing usage goes a long way to helping make sure we never see laws affecting P2P.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Multicast creates per-group state in core Internet routers, which is a serious scalability problem because those routers have finite memory. Given that the IETF has been working on this for years, I don't see how Hollywood is going to fix it.
Multicast is part of IPv4 and IPv6. It works the same in both protocols. Thus using IPv6 does not have any effect on multicast. If you don't have multicast today, then you still won't have it after everyone switches to IPv6.
Isn't that just the same as with video recorders? First they tried to ban them, and when that failed, they figured out a way to use them to their advantage to make huge profits.
I suspect Cerf's movie producers were interested in BitTorrent distribution to theaters, not individuals.