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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.
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?
...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.
The news isn't that someone figured it out. The news is that a big company actually utilizes it, and has the documentation and numbers that proves how effective it is.
I spent five minutes stealing cool sigs and all I got was this.
No it's a technical problem.
If you don't forward ports to your machine then BT runs like ass - capping out at 5k/s or less. The average user doesn't know what a port *is* let alone how to forward one.
I absolutely refuse to forward ports to BT for security reasons* (and anyway which one of the 20-odd machines here would I forward to?) so even though I know what BT is I can't use it, because the trackers either refuse to connect completely or refuse to serve data.
* There are only 2 machines on this network that allow incoming ports, and those are strictly monitored and have no access to the secure LAN.
"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
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.
You set up a network that work quite but not exactly like the internet and then complain when an application actually use a part of the internet that the network setup doesn't support. Your complaint is no more valid than me complaining that some websites don't work because I only allow outgoing http traffic with a destination port 80.
If you don't want to deal with port forwarding, you should either not expect your users to have full access to the internet or you should avoid using NAT in the first place.
Firewalls are no different. If you block all incoming traffic, any application that rely on incoming traffic will not function until you setup the firewall rules to work for you. And if you for some reason block outgoing traffic, you shouldn't expect applications that rely on that to function.
Besides your 5k/s or less complaint is mostly valid when you are dealing with torrents with very little dedicated seeding, in which case it is to the benefit of everyone on the torrent to not provide you with more than a token benefit which actually is equal to the total seeder bandwidth divided by the total number of peers (unless the seeder is using superseeding to weed out leechers, in which case you will get almost completly excluded). Meaning, that you should get atleast the same speed that you would have gotten if those dedicated seeds had used http for distribution instead.
Posters need to stop regurgitating other people's humour to get +5 Funny.
Nobody else has this sig.
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
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.