The Commercial Future of Torrrents

acrid_k writes "Yahoo is covering a story from SiliconValley.com entitled BitTorrent moving uptown. From adding Ask Jeeves content in search results to investigating use of torrents for sharing bandwidth for paid downloads, the future is looking both more restrictive and more commercial. You have to wonder about a crucial part of the equation: why would internet users share their bandwidth to benefit media companies?" From the article: "BitTorrent already has struck deals with video game publishers to distribute games with its technology. Cohen's bid to commercialize BitTorrent is a measure of how far the entertainment industry has come since the late 1990s, when Napster introduced millions of people to the power of peer-to-peer technology for downloading songs -- and mobilized scores of lawyers to shut it down."

Comments

I support it totally!

[rockytriton]

I would say share bandwidth for video game downloads because I hate those sites that make you pay to get a fast download or wait in line for 2 hours to download for free!

--
http://www.dreamsyssoft.com

Re:I support it totally!

[xiando]

It is very simple. Bandwidth must be paid for. You can download a handfull adult movies using BitTorrent from http://hardcoretorrents.com/ or you can click the sponsors and pay $5 to download a huge variety of videos at full bandwidth. What you need to realize is that the adult content at that site, just like the games, must be produced and hence they must be payd for. You may hate that you must wait in line for 2 hours, sure, but think of this: You would not be able to download for free at all if it were not for the fact that some choose to pay and not wait.. no profit, no downloading.

come on editors!

[Doctor Crumb]

Spell Check. Just do it.

BT would be good for flat rate services

[Rude Turnip]

I imagine that Bittorrent would work best economically where you pay some fixed amount to be a member of a closed Bittorrent network with exclusive content. The service could then easily track who is downloading what, then portion out your (say) monthly fee among the content producers.

Re:BT would be good for flat rate services

[Wesley Felter]

I dont' think Bittorrent or any other p2p technology makes sense for commercial distribution, because it's inherently wasteful of last-mile bandwidth, which is scarce.

But that idle last-mile bandwidth is essentially free, and bandwidth from central servers or CDNs is not free. Thus BitTorrent is cheaper, even if it is in some sense less efficient.

Could this be the beginning of the end...

[AndyBassTbn]

...of the Slashdot effect? Sure, we now use bittorrent to distribute software over a vast, distributed network. Why not adapt it to HTTP or the like? Yeah, it would make updating news sites a bit of a problem, but more static sites could brace for a large DDoS-type-hit (intentional or unintentional) by this method.

Thats one of the more overlooked commercial applications I can think of. Not only quite legal, but useful as well.

Re:Could this be the beginning of the end...

[Elshar]

It wouldn't really work unless the webpage/site is already friggin huge. Mostly because to be of any use you first have to download the torrent. Over HTTP. And then unpack it, get a list of the peers, start trying to connect to them, hash out who has what and who's going to give you what and who you're going to give what. And then the transfer starts. And maybe one of the peers dies, so you have to go grab that chunk from someone else. After going through the last few steps a couple times, you're done!

But really, all those small bits of latency add up very quickly. The only way you could reduce it would be to in parallel try to grab the same chunk multiple times from multiple peers. In essence, you'd likely vastly multiply the amount of bandwidth, memmory and CPU usage this will take. (Take that all you "we have enough (cpu|bandwidth|memory|hdspace) so stop giving us more" people!)

Realistically, BT is really only usable for file transfers of any significant size.

What IS feasible is a distributed caching system like Akamai's. I don't even pretend to have a clue how their stuff works, but I'd imagine something like that would be much much better than any BT-derived solution.

That's just my $0.02

It's not all bad

[alpharoid]

Though I'm not quite in favor of using torrents to help the media conglomerates save money, the implications can be positive in some respects. For one thing, it'll legitimize P2P and make it a crucial part of the Internet experience.

If the big players depend on the technology, it means we'll have an easier time defeating some of the current restrictions planned to curb P2P... such as limiting DSL upstream to a bare minimum, or charging for higher-than-average upstream.

Lots of providers all over the world are still considering this as we speak. Using commercial torrents would put enormous pressure against such measures.

it's a network

[tacokill]

Like the internet as a whole, BitTorrent is a network. Anyone (including media companies) can put stuff ON the network assuming someone is willing to host it. Having said that, however, there are a few rules to follow (MEDIA COMPANIES PLEASE PAY ATTENTION!):

a) The network is not yours to do with as you please. It is OUR network and you are participants. Participants != owners, no matter how would much you would like it to.

b) You don't get to choose your neighbors on the network.

c) It is a priveledge, not a right, for you to participate on the network.

d) You don't get to control what goes OVER the network. Yes, there may be things you don't like but deal with it.


Thank you for your time.