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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."

39 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Now who will I choose... by Super+Dave+Osbourne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Now who will I choose... by Fjornir · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

      --
      I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
  2. pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT by mr_stinky_britches · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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? :/

    --
    Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
    1. Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT by SeaDour · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT by SlashChick · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
    4. Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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.
    5. 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.

    6. Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT by Lehk228 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Snowden and Manning are heroes.
    7. Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT by jrockway · · Score: 2, Interesting

      > 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.

      --
      My other car is first.
    8. Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT by RemovableBait · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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? :)

    9. Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT by billcopc · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      -Billco, Fnarg.com
    10. Re:pft...1Gbit/s -1 FLAMEBAIT by monsted · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  3. 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 Chapium · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers by x2A · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    3. Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers by Super+Dave+Osbourne · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers by Firehed · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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.

      --
      How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
    5. 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.

    6. Re:Bittorrent -- distro paid for by consumers by Deezire · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "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).

  4. What I want to know is by Dowda · · Score: 5, Insightful

    will this get me porn any faster?

  5. Tee-Shirt by jarg0n · · Score: 3, Funny

    If you see da police... Warna-Brother

    --
    Error 2101: all your sig are belong to us
  6. Duke City Shootout by GMFTatsujin · · Score: 4, Informative



    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>

  7. Ehhh... by Psionicist · · Score: 3, Interesting
    "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.
    1. Re:Ehhh... by Don+Negro · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --

      Don Negro
      Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall

  8. 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!

  9. Streaming? by cimmer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:Streaming? by Don+Negro · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --

      Don Negro
      Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall

  10. Solution looking for a problem by Sanity · · Score: 2, Insightful
    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.

    1. Re:Solution looking for a problem by graystar · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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....

      --
      -- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
  11. Re:1GB/Sec by Super+Dave+Osbourne · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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? :)

  12. I'd be really excited about this, if... by screeble · · Score: 3, Interesting

    .. 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.

    1. Re:I'd be really excited about this, if... by kjart · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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

  13. 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.

  14. It's great, but... by metroplex · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "Words of wisdom: drop that zero and get with the hero" -- Vanilla Ice
  15. 2Mbps is low?! by dreamlax · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  16. reward system by john_uy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Live your life each day as if it was your last.
  17. It's a press release by nobleheath · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  18. Re:commercial coercion is not easy when its free. by bigmammoth · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 ;)