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!

[Kanon]

WoW still uses BT. It just uses a custom client that's very, very shit.

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.

toRRRents?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note to editors: please add spell-checker to your article dupe checker!

Thanks.

come on editors!

[Doctor Crumb]

Spell Check. Just do it.

Re:come on editors!

[ReverendLoki]

It's part of a subtle campaign by the *AA's to further associate anything P2P with pircay. I mean, how else would you explain all the RRRRRRs?

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

Commercial use can be for us too

[Iriel]

"why would internet users share their bandwidth to benefit media companies?"

Media companies aren't the only people who can be helped by commercial application of torrent tech. Think of this (and it's just an idea):

What if Apple integrated bittorrent into the next version of iTunes? Users that subscribe to the same podcast could be torrenting from users instead of just from the server. This way, you can get your podcasts faster, and without hogging up one server to do it.

That's just my idea. But why would we want to make things faster for us? ;)

Grrrrrrreat

[BlackCobra43]

We now have Tony the Tiger posting on Slashdot.

How are they going to control commerce?

[EggyToast]

The beauty of bittorrent is that on top of being efficient is that it's easy to use. You find a torrent link, you click it, you're good to go. If you need to pay for a link, then arguably you need to log in to a secure site and then click the link.

What's going to stop them from propagating those commercial links around the web? Arguably, I'd say that they need to force users to log into the tracker. That suddenly makes accessing those torrents more difficult.

I do agree, though, that such a setup would likely be a lot more secure than just a "pure download" method. If they DO set up some way for users to log in and access (and download) their torrents, then that means they would just need to store a list of torrents, making it easy for users to re-download stuff that's lost.

Similarly, a business could keep bandwidth and speed up by simply distributing a release among, say, 5-10 permanent seeding machines for their various releases. Most of the bandwidth would come from those, but for popular files, it wouldn't matter if you're leeching due to the increased speed of everyone on the network.

I can see how it would work for commercial stuff -- pretty much just the same as any non-commercial torrent release with dedicated distribution. What I don't see is how they're going to control access to the torrents, trackers, and the like.

I can say right now, though, that if they expect me to use my bandwidth for a download that, in all likelyhood, will take longer than a pure straight http/ftp download, I better get a "seeder" discount.

Maybe it's just me...

[argStyopa]

...but I am willing to return in kind.

Torrents for files that are being freely distributed - sure, I can share my bandwidth, especially when I don't need it. Even patches for some commercial games I don't mind because it improves games I play.

Torrents for commercial files that are charging users for the download? Kiss my butt, unless you are paying me for the bandwidth.

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.

Hate to point this out...

[Duncan3]

But the problem everyone has, and why we get 1k/sec torrents from them here, isn't that torrents suck until somthing is popular, it's that 1 or 2 users with 100+++ TCP streams each can consume all available bandwidth at the company/campus/etc.

Of course, that's also exactly why it's so popular and people like it.

Movies are just BIG, and since the torrent protocol is lets face it, about as hostile as you could design to any other traffic, it's always going to be packet shaped/blocked/filtered.

Still, gotta love free as in not paid for :)

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.

Article wrong

[afay]

From the article:

It helps that Cohen never cast himself as an anarchist who bragged that his technology would vanquish the old entertainment industry. He has gone out of his way to castigate those who use BitTorrent for piracy.

Or not...

From his homepage:

I build systems to disseminate information, commit digital piracy, synthesize drugs, maintain untrusted contacts, purchase anonymously, and secure machines and homes.

isp contracts

[Swervin]

Don't a lot of isp contract sort of pre-emp this type of resale of bandwidth?