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BitTorrent Beefs Up Network Capabilities

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the defeating-the-purpose dept.

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."

5 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers by Zzesers92 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers by timeOday · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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.

  2. Re:Upsides to BitTorrent as a distro meth. by TheDugong · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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!

  3. Re:1GB/Sec by jonnythan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT by Mika_Lindman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.