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Norwegian Broadcaster Evaluates BitTorrent Distribution Costs
FrostPaw writes "An experiment was conducted recently by Norwegian broadcasting company NRK involving the release of the series 'Nordkalotten 365' (a wildlife program) in a DRM free format using BitTorrent. One of the broadcasters has posted the approximate figures for the overall distribution costs, and discussed his reasons for doing so. Their estimated cost for using Amazon S3 to offer the files through HTTP/FTP/etc. come to approximately 41,000 NOK (about $8,000 US). However, when using the Amazon servers as the originating seed and utilizing BitTorrent, their total cost for distribution of the entire project, thanks to generous seeds, would amount to approximately 1,700 NOK. The post with the original figures is available only in Norwegian.
the definitive documentary about the Møøse!
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
Making other people do your work for free makes your own costs cheaper. Film at 11.
In other words, why is this news? It's something that has been obvious about BitTorrent since day 1: if you can get/make your users use their own upload bandwidth, you won't need as much of your own, and in a cost model that means your costs are lower. Did this really require a study?
It should be mentioned that NRK is owned by the Norwegian government, and that the programmes are not advertisement sponsored.
That's not Picasso, that's Kandinsky!
The BBC iPlayer doesn't use BitTorrent, but it does use a P2P technology for distributing the DRM encumbered download versions of their programmes. The whole thing wouldn't scale without it.
If you're not putting DRM on, then vanilla BT seems a perfect and ready-made medium. The Beeb, however, sell their programmes around the world, so won't knowingly let unencumbered versions out into the wild.
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
...should they use the Amazon servers at all, if they are planning to utilise BitTorrent? Don't they have at least a moderate connection to act as a seeder themselves?
I don't mind dating a girl that has been with everybody, as long as she had a good shower afterwards.
That is probably largely true, but most bit torrent programs seed to at least a 1:1 ratio by default; many seed more. As long as the average person seeds close to a 1:1 ratio, most of the corporation's costs are defrayed.
If you reduce the audience for your product then it's not surprising if your distribution costs go down!
... but I wouldn't bother with all that hassle just to watch a telly programme, so that's one fewer viewer.
Obviously yer average slashweenie has heard of BitTorrent, and even I would probably mange to be able to find it and install it and make it work if I really wanted to
And how many people's grandmas:
(1) can cope perfectly well with watching a telly programme on a web page in the normal way
(2) wouldn't have the remotest clue what you were on about if you started wittering about BitTorrent?
In other news, studies show that it costs less to distribute items when people come to the store and pick it up, versus the store delivering it to the people. GIFs at 11.
"If other people are generous enough to give you storage and bandwidth, and you utilize their generosity, then you can save money by using less of your own."
Remarkable!
Next week, a story about uploading video to youtube...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
If everybody does this, home Internet connections need to be upgraded or we're going to get volume pricing again. Either way, end users are going to pay for this.
After reading just half the article I could hear the thousands of keyboards frantically typing "Duh" in one form or another into posts.
./ ever :)
This has to be the most redundant, not-news, article on
It does not contain anything new... no insightful thoughts, different applications, etc.
And you can use a tracker that will ban users if they don't seed to atleast 1:1, that would help to keep the number of leechers down, but ofcourse wont eliminate all of them.
- Raynet --> .
I would have liked to see an analysis of the actual total distribution cost - not the cost to the originator, but the total. In the UK, cost of internet data consists of two parts: The cost of getting the data to your ISP, and the cost of getting the data from the ISP to your home, usually using bandwidth bought at wholesale prices from BT (British Telecom). The cost for the ISP to send data to your home is around £0.60 per Gigabyte, But the cost to get data from a huge source to the ISP is much lower. For example, getting a movie from the BBC server to your ISP has negligible cost, compared to the cost of getting the same movie from the ISP to your home. A Bittorrent would obviously send data from many, many homes to ISPs, and then from the ISPs to different homes. In other words, the data goes through the expensive route twice instead of once. I would think that the actual cost is actually almost twice as high using Bittorrent. An interesting question is: Who pays for it? In the end, your ISP pays the cost. The ISP will of course calculate your monthly payments so that they will come out ahead, and if you use torrents a lot they might convince you to get a more expensive package with more bandwidth. So in the end you will end up paying the cost.
If you're looking for the actual torrent files, episodes 1-8 can be found at the bottom of this post: http://nrkbeta.no/norwegian-broadcasting-nrk-makes-popular-series-available-drm-free-via-bittorrent/. I'm downloading episode 1 right now, and it has 73 seeds and 42 peers.
"2. Right now anybody can record and redistribute the off-the-air content. So, DRM is trying to lock up the front door when the back door is already wide open."
The "back door"is being paid for by ads. Record all you want. The question is, can content producers survive in a world hostile to any means of them recouping their costs?
"4. If a TV station made it EASY to download their shows with full commercials they'd take over the market overnight"
Right. Much like the NYT distributing their content for the price of signing up, and see how they're taking over the market.
"Who would mess around with nzb files and all that when you could just fire up your online "Tivo" and it has already downloaded everything you're interested in."
Apple TV.
"They would still own copyright so they would only need to deal with distributed bands of unpaid volunteers redistributing their work"
Yeah right!
"It seems like the TV execs are missing a huge opportunity that they could just own without issue if they just stepped out and took advantage of it."
It must be nice living in a world free of reality.
At some level this is redundant, but I'm going to state it in a slightly different way.
Of course distributing via BitTorrent is cheaper for the originator, nobody could possibly argue this. But I'd like to see a study on the TOTAL cost to society. In other words, yes it's cheaper for the originator, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. SOMEBODY is paying for all that bandwidth/etc. If you have bandwidth limits, perhaps you are paying for them to distribute their file. If you don't (as we in the US do not) then the telecommunications company is paying. Bandwidth does not materialize out of thin air. SOMEBODY pays. Further, BitTorrent is not exactly efficient. It uses a lot more requests/connections/etc to download or distribute via BT than it does via HTTP/FTP/etc.
The offsetting factor may be the more distributed load over the system, since there's no central point, really. I'm not sure how much this really helps though.
I guess my point is, the total cost to society of BitTorrent use may very well be higher than that for distributing by older methods.
-Daniel
The problem is that pretty much limits your distribution to geeks.
You need to change BT so it doesn't penalise dowloading before it'll be useful as a distribution mechanism. There are three problems with demanding ratios like this:
1. A lot of (probably most) users are on asymmetric connections - I'm on 8mb down, 832k up. So your 1:1 ratio forcing now limited me to 832k down maximum. I'll use an FTP server at 8mb thanks.
2. Nearly all users are on NAT, which means that they *can't* seed without farting around with port forwarding. upnp is rare - even when it's switched on (which, after much education about security, it isn't generally) different upnp implementations are incompatible with each other anyway.
3. Increasing numbers of ISPs are starting to account for upload bandwidth, precisely because of people taking the smeg with P2P software.
What I'd really like to see is figures for the broadcaster and the hidden costs to the ISP for each of....
- Unicast
- Bittorrent
- Multicast
Multicast is so obviously the best solution all round for the, what, at least 50% of a national TV station's audience that watch predictable and consistent shows week after week. It would be pretty trivial for PCs to grab a multicast overnight.
By the way, the BBC really tried to do this right, but ISPs were too stupid to see that it was in their best interests to cooperate. This is my reading of the evidence - I accept corrections.
It's certainly cheaper for the central server, but doesn't it just push the workload out to the local machines and network connections? Doesn't it just push the costs to the local user who pays for the bandwidth? I like P2P and think some of the algorithms are pretty clever, but I can't deny that my local pipe is saturated by the kids downloading things. There are times I would like my email and web traffic to move a bit faster.
My prediction is that some clever Slashdot folks will start claiming that P2P is just an evil trick by the man to stick us with the distribution costs!
If you're interested in NRK's programs, why not download them straight from NRK? NRK are streaming almost everything! I've written a little Ruby script that scrapes NRK's JavaScript-heavy website until it gets to the raw mms:// URL, which you can then stream or dump via mplayer. I've included a few utility scripts in svn that let you do either.
:)
Currently I'm working on features to recursively list all of a series' episodes, for example. Then they could be queued or downloaded. We could even parse the date from the filename or the link so that you can specify a time frame for your episodes. Any help is really appreciated, as it's just a rough hack so far (but it works).
Before you ask: I'm trying to learn Norwegian and NRK is a fantastic source of training material
A fair comparison is to compare a distributor using http/ftp with a specific amount of bandwidth with someone using bittorrent with the same amount of bandwidth. In that scenario, those using bittorrent would be able to download at the same speed as those using http/ftp just by connecting to seeds, and without sharing anything at all. However, if they decide to also share with their peers they could download at speeds that the http/ftp user could never reach.
Of course, the whole point of using bittorrent is so the distributor can use less dedicated bandwidth than if he used http/ftp by leveraging the upload the peers have to his advantage. So if you don't trade with peers, you will indeed notice a slowdown because of the savings the distributor is making on bandwidth.
That is however not because bittorrent is inefficent in any way.
Bittorrent does add a slight inefficency due to protocol communication, but that is a minor part, especially when dealing with big transfers. On the other hand, bittorrent ensures that files are transferred correctly by using checksums which http/ftp doesn't do. These are minor things though, and doesn't play a big role in the bigger whole. Second high-speed bandwith nodes aren't peers but supernodes unless artificially throttled down reducing one of the advantahes of P2P. Sorry, don't understand what you mean by this. P2P should be renamed the Popularity Protocol because it's vaunted efficiencies over other means are dependent on how popular the content is. Of course. Bittorrent grows more efficent the more popular the content is. If there only is a single downloader, the protocol is reduced to the efficency of ordinary http/ftp.
However, having a worst case scenario equal to http/ftp isn't a disadvantage. I dare you to show me a protocol that has a worst case scenario that is better than that.
I'm Norwegian, and I've watched most of these programs when they were originally broadcast:
The discussion page on http://nrkbeta.no/last-ned-lars-monsens-nordkalotten-365-gratis-og-i-full-kvalitet/ (Norwegian only) contains a lot of comments from the NRK people where they answer questions about all kinds of technical details (camera, sw, scaling/de-interlacing from 1080i to 576p, redoing the first episode to improve the quality etc.)
They also explain that the main/only reason they cannot do this with most of their productions is due to licensing issues, particularly for music for the soundtrack.
For this series they planned around this from the beginning, including commissioning a custom musical soundtrack.
It really sounds like they are trying to make BT distribution the default some time in the future, even though this will cut into the income they currently get from DVD sales.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Use of BitTorrent - numbers and costs
We can conclude that our experiment with BitTorrent has been a success. Most importantly, according to the comments from our users, this is something you really like. We have read more than 500 comments, and it's the first time we have seen an event with this much publicity get this much positive feedback. We have tried a lot of crazy things on the net: we've had stories on both Digg, Slashdot, BoingBoing, Reddit, Engadget and Metafilter. In these places, trolls always show up: the guys who only whine and give negative feedback. In the discussions around the fact that we as a large public broadcaster uses BitTorrent, the feedback has been almost 100% positive. Something we have never seen before in stories this large.
We can't base a new strategy for NRK on one or two comments, but when we get hundreds of them and many like this one:
In addition to this, the test has been a technical and economic success. To get this material up quickly and painlessly, we chose to use Amazon S3 both for storage and tracking. This means that we pay the bandwidth out of Amazon's S3 servers.
Some numbers
Note: Du to lacking statistics from the tracker itself and the fact that we use our S3 account for more tests, all these numbers are estimates.
Number of downloaded torrents so far: about 91000.
Due to problems with the first episode and adjustment for those who likely downloaded torrents without getting all the episodes, we subtract 11000 and end up with a number that tells us about 10000 people [likely a typo, I assume he meant 80000] downloaded all of the 8 episodes.
This means that we have distributed about 80 000 x 630 MB = 50 TB of data.
If we had paid for this through Amazon S3, it would have cost 50 000 GB * $0,16 pr GB = ca. kr 41 000.
The way it looks now, we have paid about 1700 kr for all distribution related to Nordkalotten 365. If I was a knife salesman, I'd kall this a 96% discount...
This is all good, but the most important part is that relating to the distribution itself, BitTorrent gives a fantastic user experience when it works as well as it did in this experiment. There is an automatic safety net in the fact that the load is distributed over the net. In contrast to other experiments we have done where servers have gone down, this system has handled the load and delivered the files with unusally high speed to the audience.
Once again, thank you to everyone who downloaded, shared and commented! You will see more exciting things like this in the future. Our experience of recommending Miro http://getmiro.com/ to those who don't have experience with BitTorrent or the video formats we used, was very positive.
Miro is an open and gratis solution for multiple platforms. The philosophy of the "Participatory Culture Foundation" fits well with the role of NRK as a general broadcaster in the new media world. So far, I can reveal that we have had meetings with Holmes Wilson from Miro/PCF to discuss an extended partnership. Stay tuned...
I don't know about you all but this is not the first time I've read about this series. So, I am wondering if it is available in english ? I hope the hype is not only about the distribution...
If by pipe you mean your own connection, try getting a router/gateway with QoS, and slowing down P2P, giving stuff like email and HTTP normal priority, and interactive stuff like SSH high priority. You'll notice the difference :)
No tyrant thrives when every subject says no.
Rather than the broadcaster paying, because retail ISPs have significantly higher cost for bandwidth, this just shifted the cost from the broadcaster to the ISPs.
For a one-off experiment like this, it wasn't a problem. But if you are an ISP dealing with a company like Vuse, who's businsess model is shifting terabytes in this way, it will be a problems.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Different pipes have different costs. The pipe that goes from your home to the ISP and back is the most expensive one you can find. A national broadcaster has a much bigger and more cost-effective pipe available. When the BBC started transmitting programs through the internet, ISPs were not much interested in caching the content, because the delivery from BBC to the ISP has minimal cost. But they complain very loud about the cost that they have to transport the data on to the end user, and Bittorrent doubles that cost.
It would be different if you could distribute computational workloads to computers. There you are right, a computer sitting idle would have just slightly increased cost in electricity if it was used to perform some computation and I would think that even the most efficient server has higher total cost than the additional cost for electricity on a less efficient home computer.
One of the broadcasters has posted the approximate figures for the overall distribution costs,...
No, they didn't. P2P pushes some of the distribution cost from the originator into the network, and I don't see that this is accounted for at all. If things like Oprah-Skype at 242 Gbps become common, it will not be possible to ignore the distributed network costs.
Or any router that can shape your traffic. The tomato router (open source firmware for a LinkSys WRT54GL) has the ability to prioritize BT traffic as the last priority, giving all the other protocols higher priority (http, etc).
Enjoy!
http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
As long as it's something free/gratis, I think most everyone will be happy to go out of their way, wasting a little bit of their upstream bandwidth, in exchange.
Once it starts being commercial content that you either have to pay for directly to unlock it, or have to watch a significant number of commercials, you can expect users to refuse to waste their own bandwidth on making someone else more money, and shut off all sharing. I know I would.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
P2P "efficiency" can be viewed from several perspectives.
:-)
P2P is always "efficient" from the content server's perspective, because data is delivered between peers instead of central servers (or CDN) reducing delivery costs quite a bit.
P2P consumes the content consumer's uplink, so it's "inefficient" in that sense, but generally uplink is an underutilized resource, and contributing uplink lets p2p work, giving access to large files that couldn't otherwise be provided, because the cost of delivery would be prohibitively high.
The issue is more complex for ISP's. For "traditional" P2P (e.g. BitTorrent) the p2p network is "network oblivious" and picks random data sources. This means that even though someone next door might be able to serve you, you will probably download from all over the planet, not from your neighbor. This makes p2p traffic cost ISP's more than CDN delivery (for example). If the P2P network knows about the ISP's network, then data can be delivered much more efficiently.
The P4P Working Group has many major P2P companies (BitTorrent, Pando, Solid State, Grid, LimeWire, Joost, Verlcix, etc.) and ISP's (Verizon, AT&T, Telefonica, etc.) working together to optimize p2p traffic within ISP infrastructures. So far the early results look very good - users get much faster downloads, while transit between ISP's drops dramatically, and the distance that data moves within ISP's becomes much shorter, thus consuming less of the ISP's network infrastructure.
There's an overview of P4P at http://www.pandonetworks.com/p4p, and a presentation on P4P that was just presented at NANOG at http://nanog.org/mtg-0802/presentations/PopkinPasko_Presentation.pdf. The presentation covers the technology and the numbers in more depth than a post on Slashdot can.
Current membership is P4P Working Group:
AT&T
Bezeq Intl
BitTorrent
Cisco Systems
Grid Networks
Joost
LimeWire
Manatt
Oversi
Pando Networks
PeerApp
Solid State Networks
Telefonica Group
Velocix
VeriSign
Verizon
Vuze
University of Toronto
Univ of Washington
Yale University
P4PWG Observers:
Abacast
AHT Intl
AjauntySlant
Akamai
Alcatel Lucent
CableLabs
Cablevision
Comcast
Cox Comm
Exa Networks
Juniper Networks
Lariat Network
Level 3 Communications
Limelight Networks
Microsoft
MPAA
NBC Universal
Nokia
Princeton University
RawFlow
RSUC/GweepNet (?)
SaskTel
Solana Networks
Speakeasy Network
Stanford University
Thomson
Time Warner Cable
Turner Broadcasting
UCLA
Universite Catholique de Louvain
For more information, contact: co-chairs Laird Popkin (laird@pando.com), Doug Pasko (doug.pasko@verizon.com), or Martin Lafferty (marty@dcia.info). Participation in the P4P Working Group is free for ISP's and P2P companies.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Enforcing 1:1 is a Ponzi scheme -- yes, early downloaders can get it, but it requires INCREASING numbers of later downloaders to maintain. Which is not going to happen. Which is why you are keeping torrents open for weeks to months.
A bittorrent client will pick a piece "at random" to download, and that may well be uploadable right away. So, participation is in the swarm is almost immediate and effective, even if you do NOT wait around for the 1:1.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
A 1:1 ratio for users is not impossible, unless each and every user watches each and every program. Unless you're talking about a 1:1 ratio per download, which is indeed impossible and illogical, all it requires is that a given user contribute at least as much data as he has taken over a specified period (two weeks, a month, whatever).
Maintaining such a ratio isn't impossible. If you download 3 hours of content, you have to upload at least 3 hours of that content, whether it's 3 people downloading the same one-hour program, 3 people each downloading one of those programs, or 7 people downloading some combination thereof.
That said, I don't think it's a good idea to have a requirement that high for consumer, legal distribution, but it absolutely would work at shifting upload costs. It's dumb to have a blanket requirement in a diverse market because there's no guarantee that your upload services will be needed for a given program, and with uploads far slower than downloads, it would interfere with the use of consumer Internet connections. 0.5 per month would probably be about the highest reasonable ratio, with perhaps a higher class of service for those with ratios above 1.0.
After all, they don't have to pay for their upstream bandwidth costs. Those costs get shifted to the users' ISPs. Needless to say, if everyone follows suit, users will have to pay more for their Internet to cover the costs of all that bandwidth, and ISPs will either have to raise rates dramatically or start charging by the bit.
En elg, flere elger. (din feite amerikanske kukksuger)
Uh huh. Er du blond, blåøyd og flott? Vil du suges? Jeg er frisk!