BitTorrent Beefs Up Network Capabilities

1sockchuck writes "BitTorrent Inc. is boosting its network capacity as it prepares to become a centralized hub for legal video content. In May, BitTorrent announced a deal with Warner Brothers to distribute its TV and movie content via the BT platform. It has now lined up IP transit for streaming videos at one gigabit per second."

Comments

Now who will I choose...

[Super Dave Osbourne]

Its hard, to go with the legal BT or the illegal T, somehow like iTunes success we will see the studios wise up and fight the legality battle on the convenience front. Folks are willing to pay, if convenient and easy. Torrents are super fast if you have pipe, and pipe is what BT is going to offer. I'm for one lining up to purchase pay per view streaming with BT when it comes, until then, NetFlix has my butt in a sling.

Re:Now who will I choose...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't you say frist psot?

Re:Now who will I choose...

[Super Dave Osbourne]

ignorance? I'm not sure what frist psot means, but if I were to guess it means first post, and that implies that is a good thing to post first? Are we supposed to enter first post into our postings if we are first post, and how do we know if we are going to make it (by the time we write and submit) as first post. Anyway, I'll find out surely as someone other than encrypto-god is going to fill me in on what frist psot means.

Re:Now who will I choose...

[Fjornir]

First Post on Slashdot is a badge of honor among neophytes in their larval stage. Most of them grow out of it... Unfortunately Slashdot seems to attract Larva faster than they grow up.

Re:Now who will I choose...

[Super Dave Osbourne]

TY, that was interesting reading (I won't mod your post though, sorry). I believe I had larva stage back in 1982 when I first wrote device drivers for Hayes on the Apple II for the summer and didn't eat or bath regularly because I was infactuated with the cycle counts on most of the 6052 instruction set control loops. I hardly remember what it was like, but I can appreciate the problem mentioned. I'm now endoctrined in the finer points of Slashlandness.

Re:Now who will I choose...

[WCD_Thor]

I only hope they make the video quality decent. The shit iTunes provides can suck it, I can get that shit for free, in fact I have over 100 gigs of that kind of quality on my computer, all free, some riped from TV, so it is technicly just as legal as video taping it with a VCR, but then that argument lost, oh well thats another subject. Anyway, if I'm going to pay more than $3.50 (the price of rentals at my local store for a DVD) than it beter be DVD quality. And if I want a whole season of something, it beter be DVD quality too, not the shit iTunes has!!!

Re:Now who will I choose...

[instanto]

Agree.

If they are going to compete with the illegal sources, at LEAST they can provide the data in the same quality if you are going to pay for it.

And if they are going to charge as much as the physical media for something only stored on a computer that costs nothing extra to reproduce and takes up no shelf space, it should be cheaper, or of a much higher quality.

Give us HD-DVDs to download and they'll get their money.

Re:Now who will I choose...

[Fordiman]

The question is: will the studios be providing high-quality unfettered downloads?

pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[mr_stinky_britches]

With video that will get chewed through rather quickly. Let's see, even at a low average bitrate of 2mbps, that would only be able to stream to 500 people simultaneously (then w/ the added capacity bittorrent gives, you will get a little more capacity, but even 500 people uploading at 20KB/s only gives you roughly 1/10th extra capacity. Punish me and mod me down, but I really must inquire.. When did a company signing up for a gigabit line become slashdot worthy? :/

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[Duncan3]

Last I checked, 1GB was about the smallest line you can still lease in most of the world. In some places that's being rolled out to homes. But this is America, so WOW THAT'S FAST.

But still, pretty funny unless you're stuck in 1993.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[OverlordQ]

Last time I checked, you can still lease T1's.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see, even at a low average bitrate of 2mbps, that would only be able to stream to 500 people simultaneously (then w/ the added capacity bittorrent gives, you will get a little more capacity, but even 500 people uploading at 20KB/s only gives you roughly 1/10th extra capacity.

Do you know how bittorrent works? The maximum theoretical download speed is the seed speed, regardless of the number of downloaders. With 1 Gbit/s, you can stream 500 different torrents at 2mbps to a any number of people (neglecting tracker bandwidth, as it were). That's assuming that they're all uploading at the same speed that they're downloading.

If they're uploading significantly slower than they're downloading, yes, the swarm speed will go down. However any intelligent seed will cut your download speed correspondingly. That's how bittorrent works.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[SeaDour]

Don't you even know how BitTorrent works? The bandwidth is distributed -- the initial seeds might have to come from the main BT servers, but almost everyone will download their content from other BitTorrent users.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[kokojie]

OMG, do you understand what is Bittorrent? The company does NOT have to stream to more than 500 people, unless it has like thousands of movies already. The whole point is that the users stream to each other, P2P style, so a 1 gbit line would allow the company to serve hundreds of movies to basically unlimited number of users.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[Firehed]

I don't get why, when residential cable and DSL offerings are faster (and at least an order of magnitude cheaper, last I checked). My 4Mbit line isn't dedicated, but I very rarely have it drop below maxxed out, and never to T1 speeds.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[OverlordQ]

One word, well acronym, SLA. With your residential if it drops, who cares, there's no rush to get it fixed. With a business, it's a whole 'nother ball-game, if the link dies, a tech is on the way before you can pick up the phone (well not really, but you get my point).

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[SlashChick]

Uh... because a T1 is 1.5Mbit both directions. Your 4Mbit line may be 4Mbit download, but its upload speed is likely... what, 256K? 384K? If you need to serve anything heavier than DNS, you'll want a faster upload speed than that. Hence the need for T1s and larger symmetrical UPLOAD pipes.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[timeOday]

With video that will get chewed through rather quickly.

I think you are missing the point. Getting bandwidth is the easy part, bandwidth is cheap. In contrast, getting major studios to legally distribute content over bittorrent is a minor miracle. Now the door is open.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[UberDragon]

Yeah bandwidth is cheap now. Let's wait and see what they do to Net Netruality in the coming congresional sessions. Bandwidth could get very very expensive in the coming months/years. http://www.uberdragon.net/

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[Mika_Lindman]

If they're uploading significantly slower than they're downloading, yes, the swarm speed will go down. However any intelligent seed will cut your download speed correspondingly. That's how bittorrent works.

Most people have less bandwidth for uploading than downloading. So yes, the swarm speed will go down.

And if I pay $ for my movie, I won't seed it full speed for 2 weeks after downloading, which I may do in case of my favourite linux distro torrents.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[b0r1s]

As someone who manages a video hosting site, I'd agree that 1Gbps wouldn't normally be much at all (at the last NANOG, YouTube mentioned they were doing about 20Gbps). However, for bittorrent style distribution, you split the bandwidth among many peers - the 1Gbps link is mostly for initial torrent downloads and tracker bandwidth, not nearly as demanding as streaming full content.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[Lehk228]

a T1 is only a meg and a half, though unlike consumer broadband connections you can use your T1 at 100% capacity all the time and nobody will give you shit for it since you pay through the nose for it.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[snuf23]

Absolutely. We previously had a 7.1Mbps/768kbps DSL line at my office. We were saturating the upstream on the connection. Locally there is almost no way to get a symmetrical line at a reasonable cost. I tried the local telcos and they gave me bids on frame relay with pricing from 2001! T1 speeds were not enough either as downstream was usually over 2.5Mbps.
We ended up going with a 4.5Mbps symmetrical circuit that a local company offers in the downtown area by connecting you via SDSL over a dry pair circuit. They have 200Mbps of fiber backhaul to the state's main carrier aggregation point.
It's really depressing to see the state of business offerings vs. consumers. It's like things haven't changed in 5 years.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[Neoprofin]

Maybe in theory, but rarely in practice. The vast vast vast majority of torrents I've been connected to, either the download is superfast and I have to wait for painfully slow upload to even out my ratio, or on the other hand I'm left dead in the water while my upload goes full blast so that every peer can be stuck at 67% just like I am when my upload/download is 600% Of course, once the swarm gets large enough even the limited capacity of home lines should be enough to keep the downloads of new peers going quickly. As long as BTs bandwidth can get as many seeders going as fast as possible and enough people participate I'd be willing to beleive it could work.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[mcrbids]

And if I pay $ for my movie, I won't seed it full speed for 2 weeks after downloading, which I may do in case of my favourite linux distro torrents.

The real issue here is that BitTorrent is not a particularly efficient way to distribute content. It's a way to "pass the buck" of server hosting costs to the clients, but it's very inefficient.

For example, let's say that you are downloading a video via BitTorrent. Your computer connects as a peer to other computers that are also downloading the same video. When your computer confirms receipt of a section of the video, it then uploads that section to other peers that haven't received it, yet.

The problem with BitTorrent, and why it's not a particularly efficient protocol from the standpoint of the Internet at large, is that those other peers will be geographically unrelated - they will be all over the world. Thus, the video download generates a tremendous amount of traffic over the Internet at large.

At only point, BitTorrent accounted for something like half of the traffic on the Internet.

A much more efficient schema would be the use of NewsGroups (or similar schemes) to distribute binary content. This has many, many advantages over BT:

1) You'll be downloading the video from a local source, geographically close to you. (typically, within your ISP's home network!) Thus, your download causes virtually no additional load on the Internet at large, and your download speed will be as speedy as your connection to your ISP, oversold be damned.

2) You can stream a movie in this fashion, since the download happens sequentially.

3) It doesn't require any upload from your computer, and you don't have to keep a seed active for two weeks after you watch your video.

4) For a regional ISP, it costs very little to set up a 10 TB News Server, that will cache the vast majority of downloads. And the larger the ISP, the more sense it makes to have a big, local disk in the news server(s) to take the load off the uplink. This means you have almost local access to large quantities of content in your "back yard".

We solved the problem of content delivery over 10 years ago. Why is anybody moving forward with this half-baked, inefficient, problematic technology?

If somebody were to:

A) Get the license from the video sources,

B) Put up News Servers in the ISP,

C) Provide a nice, friendly, GUI front-end for the newsgroup server, perhaps a Tivo-like appliance,

We'd have a tremendous amount of money made instantly. It would sell like hotcakes. God I wish I had the means to do this - it could be a terribly fun startup, but I'm already in the throes of one already!

My home DSL line is capped at 1.5 Mb, but is capable of 6 Mbits. That's plenty of data in a lossy compressed stream to beat the quality of television, hands down. Essentially, we'd be talking about a clustered, peered, IP tivo.

Perhaps Apple should jump into the fray, and start selling an "itunes proxy server" that would function like a newsgroup server?

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[KiloByte]

Uh... because a T1 is 1.5Mbit both directions. Your 4Mbit line may be 4Mbit download, but its upload speed is likely... what, 256K? 384K?

It's 256K or 384K only during the night and early day. Between 14:00 and 23:00, it's more like 4K -- with pings of 4K ms, too.

While you pay through the nose for a T1, it does serve the nominal speed all the time it's up. And even if it goes down, it tends to get fixed in minutes, as opposed to hours or days.

If you need to serve anything heavier than DNS, you'll want a faster upload speed than that. Hence the need for T1s and larger symmetrical UPLOAD pipes.

I'm afraid that to serve even that DNS, you can't have any downstream traffic, too. For "consumer" lines, the ISPs use insane queue lengths that pretty much kill your ability to shape that bandwidth. Thus, you can expect the latency to go to hell. Of course, this doesn't matter for a toy website, and bigger companies will have their own datacenters with a fat pipe, but for a small business that has data that is too sensitive to go into a colo, a T1 or the like is a must.
Heck, I run a NTP pool server with a tiny fraction of the bandwidth, and the latency stays reasonable even under heavy load.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[jrockway]

> It's 256K or 384K only during the night and early day. Between 14:00 and 23:00, it's more like 4K -- with pings of 4K ms, too.

I have Speakeasy's 6M/768k plan, and it's always 6M/768. It's never been down, and I've never seen any speeds lower than that (except when I'm connecting to a server that can't send data that fast :P).

Their tech support is pretty good, too. My plan has 8 IPs, but I couldn't activate them on the web form. I sent them an e-mail at 11:00PM on a Friday night (yes, yes, setting up routers is what I do for fun on Friday night...), and in 15 minutes they were active and I had a message in my mailbox saying so.

Anyway, that obviously isn't business level support, but it's good enough for me. I guess other people are paying like $30/mo for DSL and I pay $115, but I don't watch TV or have to pay for utilities (directly), so it's a good deal for me. Highly recommended.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[KiloByte]

It's 256K or 384K only during the night and early day. Between 14:00 and 23:00, it's more like 4K -- with pings of 4K ms, too.

I have Speakeasy's 6M/768k plan, and it's always 6M/768.

There are ISPs who are better and ISPs who are worse. I'm not a leftpondian, but the opinions about them I hear here on /. are full of praise for everything but the price. If you want to see how bad it can be, visit Poland. Except for big cities, we suffer from a single monopolistic ISP which is the Mother of All Oversellers.

Their tech support is pretty good, too. My plan has 8 IPs, but I couldn't activate them on the web form. I sent them an e-mail at 11:00PM on a Friday night (yes, yes, setting up routers is what I do for fun on Friday night...), and in 15 minutes they were active and I had a message in my mailbox saying so.

Now you're shitting me. Tech support, actual tech support? That can't be!
Oh, wait... you said you're not in Poland.

Anyway, even though sadly I lost contact with the reason for whom I would move to the US, if I ever make it, it sounds like the choice of an ISP is pretty obvious. Even though they're expensive.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Still connecting on 31.2Kbps dial-up here. Quite a bit less than 1 Gbps. When did gigabit ethernet become standard Duncan? Most workplaces use a 100Mbit ethernet some still 10. I have not met a single person with the capability to handle 1 Gbps to the home... I think you must have made a typo.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[RemovableBait]

The problem with this scheme (there may be others, I'm not claiming to be an expert on content distribution) is that most of the BitTorrent traffic at the moment is due to illegal downloads. I'll bet a massive chunk of it'll be TPB related. Don't get me wrong here, I realise we're talking about legal stuff, but don't be under the illusion that those legal-and-properly-licensed files are what made BitTorrent take off (I'm going to ignore Linux ISOs at the moment, but bear with me).

BitTorrent, while requiring trackers, is a distributed network. There are no specific 'areas' where files are held that could possibly be subject to **AA lawsuits (and others). The problem with your newsgroup situation is that the files are hosted on a server, owned and operated by someone. People can connect to that server, and the copyright holders can flex the DMCA and have your ISP shut the connection down. Thus, BT is a very good way of sharing bandwidth on a P2P basis where it is totally impractical and very difficult to trace the people in a swarm. See? BitTorrent is really, really good for TPB stuff and illegal things -- hence it took off and became a buzzword of sorts.

Now that Hollywood are in on this hip-new-Bit-wave-thingy, the legal downloads will begin. Realistically, the Hollywood content providers couldn't give a rat's ass about the internet... they just want to save some cash on bandwidth and server costs by using BitTorrent, which (as you say, inefficiently) takes the bandwidth burden away and pushes it onto the users. It would probably cost the Hollywood guys a lot more to set up NNTP-type servers across the globe, hence that idea will never happen. Although, why they're too cheap to use something like Akamai beats me.

The Linux distros are in a similar position. They use BT as a means of serving large files like DVD ISO images, without costing a fortune in server and bandwidth costs. I mean, lets face it, there are many distros that are just a couple of guys in a basement... without BT they'd never be able to distribute their stuff. They certainly can't afford the infrastructure, server and bandwidth costs of NNTP-type global distribution.

Oh, and before I go. Your home DSL line will probably be capped at 1.5 Mbps download, but around 384 Kbps upload. Which do you think matters more for BT? :)

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[billcopc]

You went to such great lengths to validate the concept of a News Server for video distribution.. but really all that's needed is Akamai. They already have their caching servers all over the world, just as you described.

Also the fact that most ISP's have already abandoned NNTP servers (in spirit if not in body). That's why everyone who is serious about Usenet now has to pay 10-15$ a month for a commercial service like Easynews, Giganews or Astraweb. I used to, back when I had a fat pipe because I did most of my binary xfers through Usenet and it was gorgeous. I still prefer it over Bittorrent for speed and reliability, but since BT is so simple and has tons of users I'd be foolish to ignore it, as I can reach a much larger audience with an easy-to-seed torrent, rather than uploading to a newsserver for hours, then having to honor fill requests for those sheep who are trying to use their ISP's broken NNTP server.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[monsted]

Actually, NNTP is a horribly ineffective way of moving binaries. Once you're done with the encoding, you're using about 50% more bandwidth than the size of the actual file. It also places a large load on the NNTP server - much more than serving the same files with, say, apache.

What you'll really want is an akamai-approach, but that way the studios can't hand off the costs to the ISPs like a bittorrent download does.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[gkhan1]

For popular files, with, let's say, an original batch 20-30 seeders that seed at 5mbit or more, bittorrent is MINDNUMBINGLY fast. If you don't max out your up-speed (which would lover your downspeed, since the SYN-ACK packets can't get trough), but limit it to 80% or so, it's basically the fastest way of downloading content, in the world, ever. Assuming that Warner Brothers can put up a 20*50mbit seeders (=1 gbit) plus there are, at any given time, 750+peers, it will take no time at all to download a movie if you have broadband.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[baadger]

The problem with this scheme (there may be others, I'm not claiming to be an expert on content distribution) is that most of the BitTorrent traffic at the moment is due to illegal downloads.

Spot on, but that said, most of the binary newsgroups these days are loaded with copyright infringing material too. The ISP's don't tend to care and turn a blind eye to the fact they are hosting this material 'directly'. My ISP for instance offers access to most of these groups and the files therein, albeit with *horrible* post retention.

To solve the retention issue and get access to all that lovely pirate goodness most people turn to 3rd party newsgroup providers (paying $30/month or so) and therefore increase the level of Internet traffic 'at large' anyway.

BitTorrent exists because people after their piratey downloads know its reasonable difficult to shutdown and therefore 'safe' just like a well designed P2P network (trackers are cheap, and there are distributed tracking methods out there).

The legal content providers like Warner are just cashing in on the BitTorrent brand name, which in reality probably recoups all the loses from BitTorrent piracy (although i'll leave that debate open).

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[everett]

Thus, BT is a very good way of sharing bandwidth on a P2P basis where it is totally impractical and very difficult to trace the people in a swarm. See? BitTorrent is really, really good for TPB stuff and illegal things -- hence it took off and became a buzzword of sorts.

Perhaps you meant to say the entire swarm. It's not difficult at all to determine who is uploading to you or who you're uploading too, in fact Universal Studios just determined that someone using my IP address was illegally downloading movies and had Cox Communications shut down my broadband.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[Tweekster]

Yeah but there is a lot of us with way more than the average person. I can easily upload at a rate to max out most peoples connection. So if I get enough data to upload, I can take care of 20 people...

I know this isnt uncommon because a "slow" torrent suddenly goes very fast with only 20 people on it.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[Dare nMc]

Most people have less bandwidth for uploading than downloading. So yes, the swarm speed will go down.

Once the original downloaders are no longer downloading, their upload speed is much, much greater than their download speed.

actually if we make the assumption everyone keeps the torrent up until their share ratio is >= 1:1 the available download speed must go up over time not down.

IE, their will constantly be more sources providing the content. Example if all finish with a share ratio exactly 1:1 - 2 weeks after the torrent was released, it would mean that the average speed of the orignial seeder must be maintained. So if the original seeder seeds at 800 MB/s, and the average client was uploading at 40 MB/s for the first week, then the average downloaders downloaded speed would have to be 1560 MB/s the next week to average things out.

that is also assuming the original seed shutdown after sharing the movie exactly once, and no bits that were corrupt/lost are counted. So if the original seeder continues sharing, and average ratios exceed 1:1 available download speeds should spiral upwards over time regardless of the size of the individuals upload pipe.

Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT

[zopf]

Great post. About that last point however - the download/upload speed inequality only matters at initial release time. Once enough clients download the files released by the seed, they can serve the content potentially faster than the seed did. Imagine that initially the torrent is served to 500 clients at 2mbps each. For a 650MB file, the download will complete fully in about 45 minutes. Now imagine that the seed goes offline, even though their seeds will probably stay online and serve many more files. With each new client that receives the file from a peer/seed, the possible speed of the network increases, as any client could potentially create a connection to each and every other client in order to achieve maximum bandwidth. Ie, the possible bandwith to a new client is equal to the sum of all current clients' upload speeds. Once enough clients are sharing a file, any downloader should theoretically be able to max out their download speed.

Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Zzesers92]

Am I the only one who feels like the fool when I'm PAYING twice for content? Once to download, and a second time to upload that same data to the next fool?

I'm not an "info should be free" wacko by any means. But I'm also not going to sacrifice my precious bandwidth to make WB money. If you want to charge me for content, you pay for the fat pipes so that the consumer (us all) are satisfied.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Chapium]

Many of us do not pay per megabyte on our cable services. The uploading is just using up bandwith that goes idle anyways. I believe this is true for a majority of the people in my community, with a few exceptions of a small group running eMule heavily.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[x2A]

No, you're paying once, but in two different ways; two different currencies.

If you don't wanna contribute to the upload, you gotta pay them more because they need a bigger out pipe.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Super Dave Osbourne]

When you buy a CD you are paying at least 2 times for the content, so BT and the studios should not bring you to your knees in new pain. CD manufactures make money, the labels, the packaging, the retail, the studios, you pay many times over for content now. What BT and studio is going to do is shift the distribution money to a new player like BT, and over time BT and others will be rolled into the studios, or even become them (however I would recommend the former, later by holding out just the right time and sell). I have no problem with BT becoming the media distribution arm (for a while) for the studios. The studios actually played their cards well, watching tech as it developed for the past 8 years, and now pouncing on what has become the consumer paid network they can leverage and make a killing. I'm for BT, it sounds convenient, it is fast, and if they can do it so I can pay with PayPal and have movie theatre experiences with sound and light, I'm guessing the theatre is just about ready to die.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[shish]

What, you think you weren't paying for distro before? :-/

Before you were paying for the content with money, and for the distro with money; now you're paying for the content with money and the distro with bandwidth.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I don't see anything in the articles about that, but that seems to be the most reasonable way to go. One price for a direct download, and a discount, credit or returned payment for successful uploading the same amount of data. I think this is one way the competing video services can differentiate themselves, in part by quality offered, download speed and cost. Bittorrent is generally limited by the upload speeds of the collective torrenters of a given file, particularly if the seeders are slow.

I personally would not want to leave my computer on overnight as well as potentially clog my outbound pipe just to save a commercial service a little money.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Xenographic]

No.

Because you get a faster download overall than you would have otherwise gotten, you benefit from them using BT, as does everyone else.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Firehed]

Probably true, but what about the people that do saturate their bandwidth (like myself)? Is WB going to force seeding to 100%, charge you extra or ban you from further downloads if you don't?

The endproduct of this will be more expensive or flaky internet connections. If the oversold bandwidth that was chugging along happily suddenly fills up, everyone connected is screwed. Until the ISP upgrades their stuff accordingly (which could well mean laying new/more fiber), everyone has a crappy connection. Someone's gotta pay for the upgrades, and you can bet that those costs are going to make it to the consumers, and most likely fairly quickly. Either by changing their pricing structure, molesting upload bandwidth into nothingness, or starting a per-bit charge. Or leading up to tiered connections.

However it happens, you pay twice.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[RealGrouchy]

I'm also not going to sacrifice my precious bandwidth to make WB money.

No, you see, it doesn't make money for WB, it saves it.

That way, WB will have more resources available to produce more of its spectacular smash hits like The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Eight Legged Frieks, and... um... oh I give up.

- RG>

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure this won't be a problem for TimeWarner cable customers.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[timeOday]

Effectively, bittorrent uses twice the bandwidth of a simple HTTP link to a server on the backbone. Partially due to protocol overhead, although that is not the real issue. The real issue is that P2P traffic traverses the "last mile" of network connectivity twice, and that last mile (to your home) is the bottleneck of the Internet. Doubling the load on your bottleneck is not a smart thing to do for the overall Internet. It does happen to pay off at the moment, simply because servers pay per byte and home connections pay per month. Eventually the bandwidth market might re-align to the technical reality, but then again maybe not.

Besides that, bittorrent is bad for media distribution because you can't stream. Let's say you have a 2 mbit/s link to your home and want to watch a two-hour movie which happens to be encoded at 2 mbit/s. If the movie were sent from a server at a steady rate, you could start watching immediately. With bittorrent, you'd have to wait two hours.

Finally, I just don't see the point. They're going to be charging several dollars for each video download, yet the server bandwidth for that download is only worth about a nickle. It just doesn't avoid that much expense. As a customer, I'd rather pay the extra 0.5% to download from a server and start watching immediately, and keep my uplink for my own purposes.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[timeOday]

Is WB going to force seeding to 100%, charge you extra or ban you from further downloads if you don't?

If it's regular bittorrent, it would just mean your downloads would be slow. Bittorrent has pretty well eliminated the need to ban people.

Someone's gotta pay for the upgrades, and you can bet that those costs are going to make it to the consumers, and most likely fairly quickly.

I'm generally not a fan of widespread media distribution by bittorrent (see my other posts), but IMHO improved infrastructure is the best thing that could come out of it. As for who will pay, I already pay every month. Don't you? If they're going to stop investing in the network, they'd better lower the price once their initial investment from the .com era is repaid - which I certainly do NOT expect them to do. Just think of those AT&T telephones they used to force people to lease for $7/mo, back when you weren't allowed to connect privately owned devices to the POTS network. After 25 years, you've paid $2,000 for a $14 phone. That's how they like to operate if they can get away with it.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Anonymous Coward]

''Is WB going to force seeding to 100%, charge you extra or ban you from further downloads if you don't?''

''If it's regular bittorrent, it would just mean your downloads would be slow. Bittorrent has pretty well eliminated the need to ban people.''

WTF are you talking about?

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Deezire]

"With bittorrent, you'd have to wait two hours."

What if you download the movie in small bits (heck, thats what bittorrent do) wouldnt you then be able to see that "bit" of movie? Second of all, this is not even new. http://www.tvkoo.com/ has been doing this for years. (Someone makes a stream and hooks it up to their tracker, making it avaliable for everyone).

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[acaspis]

I'm PAYING twice for content? Once to download, and a second time to upload

Depends entirely on your subscription. Cable might bill you for each byte sent or received, but DSL is typically "1 Mbit/s downstream, 256 kbit/s upstream, unlimited volume". In the later case, bittorrent uploads neither increase your bill nor consume scarce resources.

AC

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[josath]

With bittorrent, the pieces come down in random order. Thus you cannot stream it, as you need the pieces to come down in order (unless you like watching things with the video shuffled around). If someone were to mod it, such that the pieces come down in sequential order, the protocol would be much less efficient overall.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[x2A]

"I don't see anything in the articles about that"

Sorry I don't mean that they are offering this, what I mean is if they didn't take advantage of viewers upload bandwidth, they would have to find this bandwidth elsewhere, which means higher cost... and guess who that higher cost would get passed on to?

So the choice is pay part cash part bandwidth, or pay more cash. They've figured most people would rather pay less, so have made the choice for you. If there's a market for people who'd rather pay more, I'm sure someone will fill that gap.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[mtenhagen]

But they will have a proble finding how much someone uploaded since the bittorrent protocol has non reliable method of discovering that. So in the end lots of people will download at 2Mb/s and upload at 10Kb/s.

Considering bittorrent has no geographical optimazation using a distribution platform like akamai would probably be cheaper.

But ofcourse this cooperation is done by the marketing and not by the technicaldepartment (as usual).

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Anonymous Coward]

2 hours? Havent downloaded any torrents lately huh? decent seed and swarm of even like 20-30 peers these days and its like 45mins !! come home, figure out what you want to watch, make dinner, and *poof*, there it is ready to watch on your computer

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Siward]

Based on sheer statistics, it would be impossible for everyone to seed to 100% on everything they download. WB can't ban people based on this -- they'd lose customers with every new movie released.

It does seem kind of ridiculous to expect people to seed content they paid for in the first place. Maybe WB will be smart and offer some sort of rewards system for seeding (free movie downloads or movie tickets would be the obvious choice)? Honestly, I wouldn't expect a whole lot, but just a little something would probably encourage at least some people who wouldn't otherwise seed.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[romka1]

I guess you haven't used bitcomet's preview feature.
If the file is popular and downloading at around 300kb/sec down you can start watching the movie in about 5-10 minutes without any brakes

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[yabos]

Of course this is why many cable/dsl ISPs are throttling BT or implementing caps on their "unlimited" service. They want to look good saying they are unlimited but in actuality they don't really want to be unlimited. Some people using 200GB a month up and down are costing the ISP more money than the average email user/surfer.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[djdavetrouble]

With bittorrent, the pieces come down in random order. Thus you cannot stream it, as you need the pieces to come down in order (unless you like watching things with the video shuffled around). If someone were to mod it, such that the pieces come down in sequential order, the protocol would be much less efficient overall.

Already a non issue: prioritize the first xxx chunks and don't request any of the other chunks from peers (already possible and implemented).

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[josath]

Like I said though, this makes the protocol much less efficient. Instead of being able to download from almost anyone, you can only download from people who have a higher percentage complete than you do (since anyone with less percent complete, will have only bits that you already have).

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[EnsilZah]

A system i think would work pretty well is them giving you store credit for uploading.
That way they save on pipe cost, you get cheaper downloads and since you are encouraged to get more downloads for the cheaper prices you'll help them more with seeding.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[timeOday]

Already a non issue: prioritize the first xxx chunks and don't request any of the other chunks from peers (already possible and implemented).

I guess anything is possible with enough local buffering and network overcapacity. But I would still be interested to hear from people how well this currently works in practice. Relying on a bunch of voluntary, anonymous, low-bandwidth servers to deliver high-bandwidth, time-critical data seems optimistic to me. Especially since bittorrent is built around a tit-for-tat protocol, which strictly interpreted means you can only download as fast as you can upload. If you're allowed to download faster, you can "leech" by disconnecting when the download is done. Since total downloads must equal total uploads across the network as a whole (as each packet is sent and received once), that leeching is not sustainable.

In addition to those network protocol issues, I assume Warner Bros will require a proprietary client in order to (more) securely access the content, and normally the bittorrent client is also the bittorrent server. I assume you're not claiming that a suitable (secure, streaming, bittorrent-based) viewing application already exists?

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[halcyon1234]

Am I the only one who feels like the fool when I'm PAYING twice for content? Once to download, and a second time to upload that same data to the next fool?

While it has already been pointed out by several other posters, this isn't exactly how BT works, there still is a point to be raised.

Where are the savings?

By using BT to distribute files, the studios are going to see a huge savings on their own bandwidth bill. Even if they are getting it cheap / MB, once you get into the multi-thousand TB range, those costs add up. And one would expect those bandwidth costs to be built into the cost of the download.

So, if they're going to be saving a respectable chunk on bandwidth, will the cost of the download be lowered by a respectable chunk? If it's costing them next to nothing to transfer the files, then the price of the downloads should be really low. 0.99 for older movies. 0.49 for fringe movies. 1.99 for new ones. Offer print-it-yourself DVD covers for an extra 0.49.

And, as I always say whenever I pitch an idea like this, I'll go back to smoking my dream-pipe in my own little fantasy world.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Wildclaw]

While bittorrent doesn't optimize by geographical areas automatically, it does so indirectly because clients will trade with those that give them the best speeds which often will be those nearby.

It would of course also be possible (and pretty simple) to write a tracker that tries to group clients primarly by their geographical location.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[Wildclaw]

The last is definatly NOT the bottleneck in internet traffic. The only last mile bottleneck that exists is the artificial caps on upload speeds that is there to prevent consumers from being producers.

The real bottlneck is the lines between the ISPs, and that bottleneck is mostly artifical constructed to keep bandwidth more expensive and valuable. Bittorrent clients will by nature prefer other clients within the same ISP because they can get good speed from them, and will therefore reduce the stress on those lines.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[btempleton]

Mind telling me where you can deliver multi-gigabyte files for anything close to a nickel?
That's an order of magnitude less than you would pay an Akamai or other professional content delivery company.
Price out saturated megabits, figure how many you need for peak load, and tell me where the nickel comes from.

Bittorrent makes use of the otherwise generally unused upstream found in user broadband connections. With a large
cloud, users gravitate to exchanging with people to whom they have the best connections (ie. local). All of this
is spare bandwidth that would otherwise go unused. (Remote connections compete with other uses however, as do direct
downloads.)

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[dubl-u]

The uploading is just using up bandwith that goes idle anyways.

Sort of. Think of it like a freeway. Your on-ramp might be idle, but it's the traffic flow on the major roads that matters. Nobody, least of all the cable companies, builds a network so that everybody can use 100% of their bandwidth all the time. That'd be like building a highway so that it has as many full lanes as on-ramps.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[timeOday]

Mind telling me where you can deliver multi-gigabyte files for anything close to a nickel? That's an order of magnitude less than you would pay an Akamai or other professional content delivery company.

First, it remains to be seen whether the files will be multiple gigabytes. A one-hour show downloaded from bittorrent (actually 40 mins after removing commercials) is only 300 megs or so, and that's better quality and higher resolution than the iPod video downloads. I think 1.5 GB is a reasonable estimate, since that's about double VCD bitrate. A quick check of serverbeach (just because they happen to advertise on slashdot) shows they advertise 2000GB of transfer for $139. That's 7 cents per gigabyte. (And that's just for joe schmoe off the street). So about a dime for a movie. OK, that's twice what I claimed, but assuming $10 per movie download, it's still only 1% of the sale price! Not enough to justify any degredation in service.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[btempleton]

I would be interested to hear stories about whether you can really do this at Serverbeach. It is what they advertise, but lots of ISPs advertise bandwidth numbers they really don't deliver on. The people who are buying bandwidth professionally for file delivery are paying more than this, and I think there's a reason for it. 2000gb is a sustained 6 megabits (plus they are giving you a server included in this price) and the people who sell truly saturatable megabits in quantity do not sell you 6 of them, plus a server for $139/month.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[timeOday]

Admittedly I've never tried them. It would be interesting to see a 10-way "shootout" review between such providers and see what they actually deliver.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[hicksw]

Traversing the last mile is an expensive waste. A commercial bit-torrent solution might be a swarm of peering/paying ISP nodes, then simple download to each pay-per-view broadband customer. Kind of like Akamai.

Or maybe somebody could buy up a lot of dark fiber and distribute the bits to conveniently located peering points around the world. And build the outlying buffering nodes in shipping containers.

I have 2200 Kbits/sec down, 256k Kbits/sec upload - a wild imbalance for torrenting. And an ISP that went broke budgeting 30-to-1 contention ratios - conservative for dial-up but disasterous when their customers upgraded to ADSL.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[devilspgd]

It could be as simple as 10% off your next movie purchase for every 100% of an already downloaded movie you upload.

Personally, I'd never pay for a movie again. The studios would get a free mirror @ 40Mb/s or higher that I'd pretty much just leave running forever racking up free credits for future movies so it's a win-win.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[devilspgd]

I push 3Mb/s of bittorrent traffic out from my serverbeach server 24/7/365, which also happens to run a small company's web and mail traffic on a 100Mb port.

Works great, never run into any issues.

Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers

[devilspgd]

Sure, except that 256Kb/s upload can stay up for many moons, whereas the download stops once it's complete.

This means that initially, when a movie distribution first starts, the downloads will be slow OR the studios own seeds will distribute most of the content. Once the initial flurry of downloads finish though, there will be a ton of slow seeds all contributing to fill that 2200Kb/s of each new downloader, and the studios seeds can move on to the next big release.

It IS possible, as long as people are willing to seed longer term then the initial movie. Some sort of incentive towards a future purchase will go a long way here, I suspect.

What I want to know is

[Dowda]

will this get me porn any faster?

Tee-Shirt

[jarg0n]

If you see da police... Warna-Brother

Re:Tee-Shirt

[oerd]

you probably meand warn-a-brother ?

StreamTorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what we need next, streaming video over torrent protocol. stream video over multiple incoming connections. I guess it's only a matter of time.

1GB/Sec

[Nom du Keyboard]

1 gigabyte per second, while it will certainly present you with a sizable bandwidth bill, doesn't sound all that fast to me to stream videos.

Re:1GB/Sec

[Super Dave Osbourne]

That is plenty fast. I have 5/2Mbit and I can get the equivalent of 3 movies streamed with encryption in real time (not that I would, but it is doable). With lossless compression in the realm of say 50-60% compression, 1GB at my best guess would bring in about 50-60 movies live at a time. I'm not sure 100%, but that seems far more than I can watch at a given time without some specialized israeli training to handle the mental shock of the event.

Re:1GB/Sec

[x2A]

"1GB at my best guess would bring in about 50-60 movies live"

Bring in... or send out? Presumably this is the size of their pipe, so you're saying they can support 50-60 viewers at a time (+small amount of bandwidth shared by viewers). That's not a hell of a lot.

It's also really inefficient... if only we could split/double up the IP packets at a latter stage, so a single packets would have multiple IP's, and get split up by routers along the way...

The other way I guess is ISP level proxies for it.

Re:1GB/Sec

[Super Dave Osbourne]

actually all you need is 50-60 feeds out, the seeds mature and grow and the network supports the rest. 50-60 movies seeded by the studio (via BT) is plenty. Given 4-5 hours 10-20 seeds will take over where the orginal started. BT is just at the right place, right time, right contract, and eventually will become part of a studio. Now the question is how do they license the PPV torrent streaming, with encryption/passwords? I still smell captures and rebroadcasting of the actual viewing experience. Nobody is going to stop theft, the studios are trying hard now to make it easier to purchase than 'steal'. Whatever happened to sneaking into the theatre thru the exit doors? :)

Re:1GB/Sec

[jonnythan]

Huh. A typical DVD is 9MB/s.

A typical HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movie is going to be 15-30MB/s.

I'm not sure what kind of 1.7MB/s movie I'd be paying for.

Re:1gb/Sec

[Anonymous Coward]

1 gigabyte per second

Its gigabit chief. You just multiplied their bandwidth by 8.

Also... the rest of people replying seem to be confused as well. The bitrate of a DVD is measured in bits as well(note: bitrate). Also, this is an extremely fast connection. DVD quality will average around 7 megabits or so a second(no reference just a guess with variable bitrates). So... easily 100 DVD movies could be streamed along this bandwidth.

Re:1GB/Sec

[Anonymous Coward]

A typical DVD is 9MB/s.

A typical DVD is encoded with MPEG 2. There are newer and better codecs out now.

I haven't looked it up, but I'm a little skeptical of your numbers though. I've got a 496x272 @ 25 fps Doctor Who ep here that's 350MB/43:50. That's 350/2630 = 0.133 MB/s. And that's pretty good quality. Mind you, it's MPEG 4.

My guess is you really mean Mb/s but that still gives me no faith in your numbers. And I'm too tired to redo the math myself.

Re:1GB/Sec

[ichigo 2.0]

Given 4-5 hours 10-20 seeds will take over where the orginal started.

Why would someone stay around to seed? In illegal BT downloads some people stick around because they feel they owe it to the other downloaders, with a commercial system no one would care because they paid for the download.

Re:1GB/Sec

[ichigo 2.0]

The GP meant Mb/s, but his math still adds up as the GGP was talking about a 5 Mb/s connection that is capable of downloading 3 movies simultaneously. While HDTV rips compressed to 350 MB usually are ok quality, it's still a far cry from DVD which is 720x576@25 or 720x480@29.97. MPEG 4 does have better image quality, but it's not enough to offset the huge difference in bitrate and resolution.

Re:1GB/Sec

[x2A]

Unless they maintain ratios... the more you upload, the faster you're allowed to download

Re:1GB/Sec

[onedobb]

Maybe Betamax?

Re:1GB/Sec

[Super Dave Osbourne]

With centralized network of a seed program, the sheer numbers of people that use it will provide folks that just let it seed and expire. Its a critical mass issue, and that mass will be large due to the nature of the beast.

Re:1GB/Sec

[cylcyl]

you're mixing your bits and Bytes. DVD's are 9 Mbps and next gen are up to 36Mbps

Upsides to BitTorrent as a distro meth.

[Avillia]

Without saying anything as to the companies who do this, DRM, etc:

1. It makes everyone get easier and more streamlined access to content by sharing the bandwidth cost across the consumer base; By sacrificing some of your bandwidth, you in turn give whatever big media company is distributing the content less bandwidth needing to be purchased, which results in less overall cost, which results in savings passed to the consumer.
2. Distributed content distribution platforms such as Bittorrent renders those fiber owners who wish to enforce charge-for-priority services completely fucked. If it's all spread out, communicating peer-to-peer instead of peer-to-hub, it gets harder to identify the company behind the traffic so as to extort them... I'm having a hard time describing it correctly. You get the idea.

Re:Upsides to BitTorrent as a distro meth.

[TheDugong]

"which results in less overall cost, which results in savings passed to the consumer."

I'll believe it when I see it.

New releases are AU$7 at my local video shop 2 mins walk away open 10am to 10pm 7 days. We watch most films we want to watch at the cinema anyway.

Better be very cheap, if they want me to help with distribution!

Re:Upsides to BitTorrent as a distro meth.

[plasmacutter]

1. It makes everyone get easier and more streamlined access to content by sharing the bandwidth cost across the consumer base; By sacrificing some of your bandwidth, you in turn give whatever big media company is distributing the content less bandwidth needing to be purchased, which results in less overall cost, which results in savings passed to the consumer.

this is voodoo economics.. savings to the producer do not automatically mean savings to the consumer.. moral hazard and greed cannot be discounted.. especially since we're talking about hollywood here.

All other companies who outsource/offshore their labor or manufacturing do not lower their prices proportionally on the consumer end, but instead suck up most of that cost savings as profits for their CEO's or re-investment in their company.. this means that a lot of real purchasing power is lost to the consumer end.

Re:1GB/Sec (SHOULD BE Gb, little b, for bit)

[in_repose]

I believe the proper terminology would be 1Gb/second, since we're talking about gigabits.

Now, on the other hand, if we were referring to 1GB (GigaBYTE) per second, you would be correct. There is a big difference (roughly 8x the difference) between the two.
Gigabytes this! Gigabits that...

Duke City Shootout

[GMFTatsujin]

It's not just the big studios. Smaller non-profit festivals are reaping huge exposure and benefits from allying with BitTorrent.

Every year for the past seven years, there's a film making festival called the Duke City Shootout in Albuquerque NM. The idea is that writers from all over the country submit a 10-12 page script, seven of the best get picked out, and the Shootout brings them to Albuquerque to help the writers film their scripts.

No, not pro writers. Guys like you and me. (Well, depending on who you are, it might just be me.)

Respected professionals in the film world (read: Morgan Freeman) are heavily involved behind the scenes, and some of them mentor the crews on the set. One week of madness later, you've got yourself seven brand new indie success stories and a whole lot of exhausted, happy people.

The Duke City Shootout is super cool, and a great place to get your hands on new and interesting video gear. It's literally top of the line digital tech. Apple, BitTorrent, Intel, and a host of other companies are footing the bill so that they can show what can be done by dedicated, creative amateurs with a little guidance and the right toys.

BitTorrent is one of the sponsors this year. They're going to distribute the winning films for free, and they've even got a backload of winners from years past. Admittedly it's not like downloading a complete cinematic experience -- the Duke City Shootout download will, for example, finish the day you start it.

Check it out for yourself: Duke City Shootout home site, and the BitTorrent host for the last year's winners.
</shill>

Re:Duke City Shootout

[Sanity]

Apple, BitTorrent, Intel, and a host of other companies are footing the bill ... BitTorrent is one of the sponsors this year.

But this doesn't really validate anything about BitTorrent, except the fact that they have persuaded some investors to give them money, and they are spending some of it on a film festival.

These festivals may be reaping the rewards of BitTorrent's generosity, but not BitTorrent's business.

a centralized hub

[Julian Morrison]

...is surely what BitTorrent is all about avoiding. If they need to beef up, they're doing something wrong.

Probably the thing they're doing wrong is kissing RIAA butt. Generalising: forced monopolies demand centralization, and hence scale horribly.

Ehhh...

[Psionicist]

"BitTorrent Inc. is boosting its network capacity as it prepares to become a centralized hub for legal video content. In May, BitTorrent announced a deal with Warner Brothers to distribute its TV and movie content via the BT platform. It has now lined up IP transit for streaming videos at one gigabit per second."

The whole freaking point of BitTorrent is to transfer files so you don't need a fat pipe. Why exactly do they need 1 gigabit per second to run a tracker? Not even The Pirate Bay run on 1 gbps pipes.

I don't buy this. I think the MPAA just want to launch a regular distributor->consumer (as in, not-P2P) service under the BitTorrent-name so they can fool the regular joes this whole BitTorrent-thing has nothing at all to do with P2P. After all, real P2P is the complete opposite of their bussiness modell, so they probably don't want it generally accepted.

Re:Ehhh...

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole freaking point of BitTorrent is to transfer files so you don't need a fat pipe

Someone has to have bandwidth to seed the video. Then if that torrent falls out of popularity, to re-seed if a new demand returns.
One would assume the studios would be constantly adding content, if successful.

Re:Ehhh...

[s4m7]

The whole freaking point of BitTorrent is to transfer files so you don't need a fat pipe. Why exactly do they need 1 gigabit per second to run a tracker?

Aha... a popular misconception, but BitTorrent is democratic in nature... that is, the more people are interested in it, the more distribution points there are. Since WB TV content isn't really that popular...

Re:Ehhh...

[Don Negro]

The 1 Gb pipe is for seeding, to make sure a swarm can never die. If only one person is downloading a given file, it'll end up being a straight download, but if there's anybody else in the swarm, the BitTorrent effect will kick in and improve things for everyone.

Re:Ehhh...

[plasmacutter]

and explain to me why we should be double-charged for the content then?

we pay for the upstream they use to distribute their video.. we could be using it to distribute our files.. so explain to me what they will do to compensate us for our bandwidth.

Re:Ehhh...

[Lehk228]

if you don't like it, don't use it. you get compensated by not having to wait in line behind a thousand other downloaders to get a popular file.

Re:Ehhh...

[plasmacutter]

in commercial distribution the lack of a wait is not "compensation".. it's customer service.

If they can't afford the servers to provide direct downloads to me then they have to provide some compensation to me for their use of my bandwidth... something other than the current level of expected customer service.

Re:Ehhh...

[askegg]

I dare say the pipe will not just be used for tracker information, but to provide the seed as well.

1G is a decent start and it will be interesting to see what the demand and upload speeds of clients will be. Of course the more popular the content, the larger the swarm will be; so it will largely self regulate.

The next most logical step is to place seeding servers at strategic locations to service the demand. This way download hotspots can be serviced from local seeding servers and the general swarm, which should increase reliability and perfomance.

Re:Ehhh...

[Jugalator]

The compensation may come in reduced prices as the price of bandwidth isn't 100% theirs and doesn't need to be covered by the video costs.

Re:Ehhh...

[plasmacutter]

I refer you to this post on how bandwidth cost is unlikely to affect the consumer side..

Re:Ehhh...

[Lehk228]

they don't have to do shit. if you don't like what they are offering don't sign up.

Streaming?

[cimmer]

I'm not sure how one provides streaming video via BitTorrent. Video is linear. BT downloads are inherently non-linear.

Any attempt to explain is appreciated. Thanks!

J

Re:Streaming?

[mantar]

Good catch. My guess would be that it was a poorly chosen word in the article...

Re:Streaming?

[Bushcat]

BitComet allows the incoming video to be viewed. I guess the download speed has to be above the viewing speed (duh), and I also guess it prioritizes the packets ahead of the viewing point. No doubt this is in the BitComet documentation somewhere.

Re:Streaming?

[Don Negro]

They're not selling streaming video, they're selling downloads to own.

There are some nifty things you can do for BitTorrent-assisted streaming, but that's not what they're up to right now.

Re:Streaming?

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Streaming is a synonym for downloading if it's multimedia and you're tech-challenged.

Re:Streaming?

[Anonymous Coward]

no it's not.

Re:Streaming?

[19thNervousBreakdown]

*slaps forehead*

Read the last part of my sentence again.

Re:Streaming?

[zippthorne]

Technically streaming is a kind of dowloading, but with severe limitations on how, since the content is displayed as the data comes in, there must be a buffer, and the file must be downloaded somewhat linearly. at least until the buffer get obscenely huge, but if the download ever does get significantly ahead of the current position, it's fast enough that there's no real need to accelerate further.

Re:Streaming?

[cimmer]

"Streaming is a synonym for downloading if it's multimedia and you're tech-challenged."

Could you provide some reference materials? I've never heard of streaming media being referred to as a synonym for downloadable media and I'd be interested to know if I've really had my head in the sand or if you are just being a troll. Here are a few references pulled from a quick Google search.

http://www.clickandgovideo.ac.uk/Glossary.htm#S
streaming: Process of sending media over the Internet or other network, allowing playback on the desktop as the video is received, rather than requiring that the entire file be downloaded prior to playback.

http://www.walthowe.com/glossary/s.html
streaming audio, streaming video: Technologies which permit listening and watching continuously as the signal is transferred to your system from a remote web site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_media
Streaming media is media that is consumed (read, heard, viewed) while it is being delivered.

http://home.real.com/product/help/rp10v8_ts/en/Str eaming_Media.htm
Streaming Media is media (audio, video, or graphics) that is delivered as a stream of data, and played as it is received.

Re:Streaming?

[19thNervousBreakdown]

I know what streaming is. I guess I didn't make it clear enough; the person that wrote the article doesn't necessarily know what streaming is. When you talk to the average computer-(semi/il)literate person, if they say streaming the best you can be sure of is that they're saying "downloading media".

Re:Streaming?

[Anonymous Coward]

why, is there some kind of coded message in it that contributes something to the discussion?

Re:Streaming?

[19thNervousBreakdown]

No, there's a blatantly obvious message that contributes to the discussion. You know, the part that says "and you're tech-challenged." Pay special attention to the word "and". If the statements on both sides of the word "and" aren't true, then the entire statement isn't true. Have you been huffing paint?

Re:Streaming?

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Yeah, I know, but thanks anyway.

Re:Streaming?

[cimmer]

Ah, thanks for the clarification. I read it as though you were stating I was tech-challenged. Apologies.

Re:Streaming?

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Hah, sorry about the tone of my last reply then :P

I've always thought English should be parenthesized.

If (it's multimedia && you're tech-challenged) { streaming is a synonym for downloading };

;)

Solution looking for a problem

[Sanity]

P2P distribution makes sense when the distributer can't afford the bandwidth, but there are numerous video distribution sites who appear to be having very little trouble just distributing videos from a central server (youtube, google video, revver etc). Why would any user endure the trouble of installing a client, and waiting for an entire video to download before they can watch it, when they can just go to another site and watch it immediately.

I'm all for P2P where it is needed, but video over BitTorrent sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

Re:Solution looking for a problem

[graystar]

These sites all have crap resolution.

If you download a nice encoded X264 file, plug your tv into computer, stereo into computer - you get lovely TV quality video with NO SKIPPING and BUFFERING. I just set up a few shows I want to watch, go to work, come home and watch them.

Now imagine a MythTV et all set top box with RSS feeds of bittorrents....

Re:Solution looking for a problem

[TheRaven64]

Actually, it's a solution for a real problem. Just not the problem they seem to be trying to address. This sort of thing would be great for cable TV companies wanting to offer VoD. Each cable box could have 300GB or so local cache. If you want something popular, the odds are that one of your neighbours already has it, so you can stream it from them. Since you are all on a bus network for the last hop, your downloading it from them places no more strain on any part of the network than getting it from anywhere else. Even if you get it from someone on a different (but close) segment, you are likely reducing the load on the network.

Unfortunately, bittorrent would be no use at all in a situation like this, since it doesn't make use of location information.

Who's Resources???

[CampbellFromCITA]

My number one biggest problem with this idea is that there are companies that will be profiting from the network resources that torrent users basically donate - the same as any "pay to play" content over distributed systems where the end users give back into the network. Why should Time Warner (for instance) be able to charge their clients to use MY bandwith?

bittorrent vs blu-ray

[heroine]

The future really is an aggregating network like bittorrent, not physical media. You'll have 1 terrabyte cell phones aggregating content all day to be played back on PC's throgh a local wireless connection to the cell phone.

Unfortunately download services have been bulletproof on content protection. If anyone ever breaks into cinemanow, they can change the keys, which they can't do completely even with blu's millions of keys. That's going to keep it expensive.

I'd be really excited about this, if...

[screeble]

.. my isp (shaw) didn't use Ellacoya traffic shapers to filter BT (and most other p2p) traffic down to a snail's pace right now.

I would be amazed to see any BT traffic over about 10kB/s these days. It's not Bit torrent... It's bit treacle.

Paying for video-on-demand and then having to wait a week to watch the show doesn't seem very enticing to me. Of course, Shaw has their own VOD mechanisms via digital cable so this filtering may just be a thinly veiled part of the Big Plan to Screw Consumers.

Re:I'd be really excited about this, if...

[CampbellFromCITA]

Actually this is a good point - there are a number of ISP's that have taken steps to minimize or block BT traffic to conserve their bandwith...
Maybe this will change that.

Re:I'd be really excited about this, if...

[kjart]

FYI, I use Shaw as well and find that uTorrent can get around Ellacoya just fine using protcol encryption. Went from around 10k to hitting the caps with that one setting.

Cheers

payment and DRM?

[hitmark]

how will that be handled?

will it be a lease based system or will it be a pay to "own" kinda system?

something tells me the format will be WMV, as it allows more flexible styles of DRM...

Re:payment and DRM?

[QCompson]

Warner Brothers has announced a payment plan; it seems quite reasonable, and should help to stem the tide of illegal movie downloading.

$1.95/per min for the first five minutes, and $5.95 for each additional minute!*

*newer/popular titles may not fall under this pricing plan.

Re:payment and DRM?

[hitmark]

something tells me this is a joke ;)

Yay!

[NexFlamma]

Yay for the legitimization of BT!

This only makes it easier to steal... er pirate... er... find movies to download...

WTF is a....

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is a "treacle?"

Re:WTF is a....

[ChaoticChowder]

Dude, he's from the south, relax.

Re:WTF is a....

[screeble]

The fuck is a "molasses," but "bit molasses" just sounds dumb.

By treacle, I mean that good old 17th-century English (south? wtf?) definition of: "the uncrystallized syrup produced in the process of refining sugar."

Molasses pours in a big slow glob and then trickles down to nothing. Eventually, you're waiting while the very last drips come out of the container.

Re:WTF is a....

[Ginger Unicorn]

i never realised americans don't use the word treacle.

Re:WTF is a....

[MrNougat]

I have oft used the word treacle, but generally in a derogatory sense to describe something that is overly sugary and sappy (think a really cheesy song). I have not used it as a metaphor for something slow-moving. In fact, when I read the original post, I was about to post myself about the use of the word treacle. But I read the thread first.

Re:WTF is a....

[cr0sh]

Hmm - learned something new today - here I was (an American) thinking you simply misspelled "trickle"...

Giving the telcos a reason

[VGPowerlord]

Remember that net neutrality amendment that the US House just shot down?

Thanks Bittorrent for giving the telcos ammo to use against net neutrality when it goes to the Senate.

Streaming?

[nicoz]

Please comment because I'm not sure how many of guys are using the term "Streaming". I've worked with streaming video which is real time or buffered streaming. It's always been my understanding that torrents are downloaded in packets of data received in no consecutive order from many peers, then pieced back together, which is why you can't preview a file like you might in Kazaa or some other P2P app. So how can you "Stream" a video via the Bittorrant method of downloading information? Don't insult, I'm truly trying to learn.

It's great, but...

[metroplex]

It's great that somebody is organizing a legal pay-per-download service based on bittorrent on a large scale, but teaming up with Warner Bros? Shouldn't they have first started by teaming up with some smaller, possibly independent production house? Or test it with short movies first? I would certainly pay to download beautiful short movies, they take up less time to dosnload and you often only get a chance to see them at film festivals or collected on dvds several years after their release, if you are lucky. A bittorrent hub dedicated to selling short movies (and not just independent ones) would be a winner, in my opinion. With the general increase of bandwidth for home lines in both directions, you could easily get a short in less than a hour.

Re:It's great, but...

[GMFTatsujin]

See the Duke City Shootout for exactly the scenario you describe.

Yeah. I'm shillin'. Oh well.

the people behind directX 10

[56ker]

Here's a link to the "for print" version which only has a couple of ads and saves you having to click through multiple pages.

It would be nice..

[Skythe]

If they provided different qualities for the movies/etc. I know most of you succesful slashdotters are sitting behind your 1MB/s> connections scoffing at such a suggestion, but not everyone has big fat transfer pipes, and for those people, {myself}, id rather spend a couple of hours downloading something and watching it as a compressed 120mb xvid or 70mb rmvb than leave my 256kbps connection on overnight to download those hunk-a-chunk 350mb/700mb hdtv quality releases.

Which IS Why Warner Bros are sending out DMCA's

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Warner Bros is sending out DMCA's for fan created music videos on youtube.
Because they are going to provide all the videos online and fans be damned!

zOMG FIST PSOT

[Jesus_666]

Also, writing "frist psot" or a variant of it in a post that clearly isn't the first post is a fine example of the trolls that make Slashdot what it is. A commmunity with mostly amusing trolls, that is.

2Mbps is low?!

[dreamlax]

Wow, you must demand some really decent quality video. Your average 90 minute MPEG4/XviD/DivX 700MB movie is between 0.8 and 1.2 Mbps ((700 * 8)Mb / (90 * 60)sec = 1.03 Mbps) including audio. This quality is surely decent enough for video streaming... So if 2Mbps is low in your opinion, I would like to know what sort of video you normally stream and where you get it from (and what codec it uses). 2Mbps can usually encode a DVD with all 6 channels of audio and full DVD resolution with noticeable but little quality loss (when quantisers and variable bitrate settings are used correctly).

And please adapt yourself to the correct metric abbreviations. A lowercase m represents "milli", i.e. 1/1000, and an uppercase m represents mega, i.e. 1,000,000, because I am sure you intended to say 2 megabits per second and not 2 millibits per second.

Re:2Mbps is low?!

[KiloByte]

Wrong. For counting bits or bytes, it's 1024, not 1000, dammit.

And for the common usage... yes, the 1MB T1 I have does support 1048576 bytes per second if you count packet headers. The ADSL I got I home is usually more like 4KB/s, so I can't tell you if they use 1024 or 1000 in their marketing material :p

Re:2Mbps is low?!

[dreamlax]

Technically I am not wrong. A mebibyte is 2 ^ 20 bytes, a megabyte is 10 ^ 6 bytes (but megabyte is also synonymous for mebibyte in most cases).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
As you can see IEC and the IEEE both use the mebibyte terminology. I'm starting to catch on simply because it feels like I've learned something new (and that's a real plus for me) even though it's not rocket science. I do understand why "kilobytes" / kibibytes are measured in multiples of 1024, but I also believe it is a good idea not to abuse the metric abbreviations as it will (and does, and just has) cause confusion.

Re:2Mbps is low?!

[KiloByte]

Not really. English, unlike French, doesn't have an "Academie Englaise" which can change a word's meaning out of the blue with a decree, so in a given community a word means whatever that community uses.

That is, among mathematicians, pi=3.1415926..., no matter if a given legislature tries to declare it to be 3.

And, comparing the google rating is just crushing. In fact, for kilobyte/megabyte, you need to resort to tricks to avoid the google cap.

reward system

[john_uy]

since many people already mention that you are paying for the content as well as distributing it, why not put a reward system for the seeders.

a particular gb, let say, will allow you to convert it to credits used to pay for new movies. seeders and wb will be happy. i'm sure there will be a lot more of leechers than seeders.

It's a press release

[nobleheath]

Global Netoptex Inc. wanted to advertise that they have a high profile customer and consequently that other customers might find their service satisfactory; and BitTorrent wanted to remind their investors that they have an arrangement with Warner and consequently that potential investors might want to consider sending a little money their way. So they issued a joint press release. Don't read too much into the bandwidth - GigE comes with PC's these days and dont read too much into the re-announcement of the Warner thing. This is just cheap advertising and it would appear the /. fell for it.

Big Money Bittorent

[JasonTik]

Now that big money is using bittorrent, many ISPs that throttle or block it may have to reconsider their policies on that.

commercial coercion is not easy when its free.

[bigmammoth]

This is kind of silly. BT is really not necessary if people are willing to pay for the content. Bandwidth is incredibly cheep when purchased in mass quantities. You don't see apple or Google keeling over from bandwidth costs of distributing their video content. It's like what $10 bucks a month for 250GB bandwidth (average web hosting cost)... I can't imagine how cheep it is for someone like Google. At any rate it's safe to say its pennies to the gigabyte.

This BT-WB deal is about re-branding the "bittorrent" experience into the commercial context. It confuses the open protocol with the commercial company. This is the normal commercial appropriation of sub-cultures/technologies; it happens over and over again but if BT-WB leave the protocols open it's not necessarily a bad thing. For example the commercial appropriation of Linux has not hurt its freely associative non-coercive creative qualities because they have been protected by free software copyright i.e the GPL. Likewise there are many open source and free bittorrent protocol clients which are used in much larger numbers than the commercial Bittorrent Company bittorent client. So it will be difficult to propose a system that substantially limits people's freedoms, in the context of large pool of free (as in freedom) software.

As an open protocol BT is great! BT is freely associative, participants can use it to mediate their own content distribution. So we have groups like the EZLN being their own distributors of content linking to a torrent right off of their indymedia blog. BT and other free non-discriminatory video hosting services (youtube, google video) are substantially less coercive than the systems which currently mediated the distribution of films today. So we should watch them carfully and promote their creative potential. They are a key enablers in the transition into participatory culture.

-----
a Chomsky quote re-interpreted as advocacy for free software:

"If its correct, as I believe it is, that a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work or creative inquiry for free-creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions then of course it will follow that a decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized."

Re:commercial coercion is not easy when its free.

[TheSunborn]

Can you name a single company, that will host our server, and sell bandwidth at the price of 10 bucks a month for 250GB? Because I have been looking for one for quite some time.

(The reason webhosting companies might sell at that price, is that they know you can't actuelly use all that bandwidth, when running on there
hardware, due to limitations in there software,cpu/harddisk and available memory.

Re:commercial coercion is not easy when its free.

[bigmammoth]

Collocation is very different from hosting on a shared server (physical places charge rent, physical space is taken up, heat considerations, electrical power, personal to deal with secure physical access etc) add a great deal to the cost. Compared to a millimeter (or less) space on a Hard Drive. You have to buy a lot for bandwidth for it to become cheep hence shared hosting is cheaper than collocation.

My point is simply that bandwidth is very cheep relative to the cost of the content if the content is being sold. So if you pay 99c for a song on itunes like 0.001% of that is going to bandwidth costs. The same will be true for films maybe 0.1% of the total cost this rivals the ratios that nike pays for manufacturing their shoes ;)