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...

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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).

What I want to know is

[Dowda]

will this get me porn any faster?

Tee-Shirt

[jarg0n]

If you see da police... Warna-Brother

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>

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...

[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: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: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? :)

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: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: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.

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.

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.