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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
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?
Amazon S3 has a unique feature. Lets say you got hugefile.mov to serve. User can click the .mov file directly to download via ordinary http/ftp or you simply add ?torrent to the URL and it creates/enables a torrent and start tracking it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yes, and the online content would be as well. They're already surviving in the world you describe - you can get most shows today ad-free, and yet almost nobody does. Oh sure, the average slashdotter might, but I'm talking about the other 99.999% of folks who have money to spend on advertised products.
Right. Much like the NYT distributing their content for the price of signing up, and see how they're taking over the market.
Uh, the online news market is dominated by probably 3-4 companies (I'm talking about the content and the ads - not the portal people visit through). To the extent that they're losing out it is to companies like google who are doing exactly what I'm suggesting the TV networks should do. All of them were traditional news networks before the internet came along. I don't see your point. No one network would beat out all its peers by doing online - but they could make a lot more money this way.
Apple TV.
Uh, what will Apple TV do? Make it easy for people to download TV shows with random filenames posted to random distribution networks by random people? Easier than obtaining the TV from a couple of TV networks distributing shows via standardized protocols over big pipes with lots of infrastructure behind them? I'm sure the networks would give Apple a cut for every referral - the button to watch Battlestar Galactica from the official sources will be bold and on page 1, and the option to configure browsing through random files on TPB will be buried on configuration page 12...
Yeah right! (linked to TPB)
Ok, go ahead and schedule 10 TV shows to auto-download all episodes from TPB so that your 80-year-old grandmother can just click on the show they want and watch it on their TV using a remote control (not a keyboard). Oh wait - the 10 shows don't have any metadata, and the filenames aren't consistent, and a few are posts by guys who didn't bother to seed.
Sure, TPB works, but not well. And it won't have the Gardening special that aired last night or anything not of interest to geeks (who make up all of 1% of the population).
And TPB exists now, and for whatever reason 99% of everybody doesn't use it. Maybe everybody you know does, but most people don't. So this isn't a new threat. And going online will probably actually help to combat it, as opposed to networks sticking their heads in the sand.
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...