Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Traffic Falls In the U.S.
First time accepted submitter CAKAS writes "After legal actions taken by several industry outfits, BitTorrent traffic has fallen in the United States to the all time low of 12.7 percent of internet traffic. However, this trend seems to be unique to the U.S. — In other parts of the world, like Europe and Asia, BitTorrent traffic continues to rise. 'According to Sandvine, the absence of legal alternatives is one of the reasons for these high P2P traffic shares.' In the U.S. legal content delivery has flourished and provided customers easy access to content. This seems to suggest that due to these alternatives, people are less willing to pirate and pay the publishers for entertainment." (Calling it an "all-time low" seems a stretch, when talking about something released in 2001.)
Maybe Americans are getting smart and using VPN's and proxies :D
ha! the "all time low" for bittorrent should be 0.00%, you know, back before bittorrent was invented. saying "all time low" is an odd expression for something that started at zero.
Filesharing lawsuits and six-strikes laws never did anything to stem the tide of piracy. What's been causing the fall of Bittorrent as a share of internet bandwidth in the US is the rise of legal streaming sites (Netflix, Hulu, etc), alternatives which don't exist in most of the rest of the world.
Netflix works.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
So, is actual BT usage going down, or is something else simply growing much faster?
Actually, the article states:
But:
So what does that mean? How did they conclude that there's little to no growth if the numbers don't even take a very important fact like absolute traffic growth into account? Just wild guessing?
And little to no growth doesn't mean decline. It means it's stable. So it's not really accurate to claim that "BitTorrent Traffic Falls In the U.S."
Maybe one will have to read the full report, and it's all there. But I don't think the linked article supports the assertion that BitTorrent traffic is falling in the US. At worst, it's growing slower than other services.
Clever signature text goes here.
let me see they migrate to a new format that cuts the size roughly in half and the traffic is at 12.7 % that means to equate it to old use would be 25.2% an actual increase form the 17 % it was the previous year...
WOOT FOR STUPID PAYING ATTENTION
and cudos to x264 for making it to the big time ( i been making my own SD x264 rips since 2004)
Games are still using torrent protocols in the background to push updates and added content around. It saves them bandwidth and server wear and tear. Until all the ISPs switch to metered contracts, that is, which would probably put a dent in the gaming industy's business model.
but now that I am well off, I have too much to lose from an RIAA/MPAA lawsuit. I won't give these scumbags my money, so I am essentially blacked out from all their media.
It doesn't make any real sense why people would stop downloading over bittorrent suddenly this year. If anything I imagine the big bittorrent users(The scene guys and usenet folk) just started to using encrypted tunnels to rented servers. You can get a decent one with 500gb's of traffic for cheap. You can easily ramp that up to 1tb+ for under 100$ a month. While yes, that is beyond what most people will use, but its not unreal to think that the big bandwidth users(500gb + a month) are moving towards it. I know that several scene users utilize these remote servers. Combine that with SSL encrypted traffic between clients and wham! Big drop in detectable traffic.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Join it or die. I really have lost patience with these idiots.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
1 - Nothing released recently is worth getting..
2 - Proxies/darknets
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This just encourages the *aa's to continue harassing us. Need to step it up people.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
are you living in?
In the U.S. legal content delivery has flourished and provided customers easy access to content.
Torrent traffic has probably fallen due to fear of SWAT teams busting your door down. Not any attempt by content providers to adapt.
The new season of Breaking Bad has yet to air.
Yes lets kill it.
Government announced that FTP protocol will be made illegal by July.
News at 11:00
I and many people I know have been getting seed boxes. I think more torrent traffic is just becoming encrypted.
So Linux downloads has declined in the US? That is bad news!
It's because everybody already downloaded everything and there are no good movies any more.
I'm an avid user of torrents for multiple pieces you cannot get via 'authorized' sources. In the past year, I've seen the performance of torrent downloads degrade here in the US, primarily with Time Warner. The reason, so called traffic shaping. I see exactly at which point the ISP interferes with my downloads, just a few seconds after they start usually no more than a minute. The threshold used to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 2MBPS, but now its more like 1.25. Throughput burst past that for a couple of seconds and then it cuts back and flatlines right back to 1.25 consistently for the duration. That's traffic shaping at work. That would account for the huge drop in bittorrent traffic overall, but I agree more and more legitimate sources has also helped.
Truth be told, many of these legitimate sources would benefit from using the torrent protocol but for one reason or the other they don't use it.
"This seems to suggest that due to these alternatives, people are less willing to pirate and pay the publishers for entertainment."
Downloading is NOT piracy! They are two very different things. Stop doing the copyright trolls' jobs for them by calling it what it isn't.
What, '10 year low' sounds like a stretch?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
The conclusion that BitTorrent traffic has "fallen" is not actually supported by the Sandvine report. They complicate things by reporting everything as percentages, but if you dig deep enough you find overall mean traffic is up 40% year-over-year. So, in reality, BitTorrent traffic has continued to GROW, it's just a smaller percentage of the overall traffic.
They actually make this point about Netflix in the report. Their share of peak traffic increased by only 0.2%, yet they point out that due to overall traffic increase this amounts to a 30% increase in absolute traffic associated with Netflix.
It can be useful for things like debian ISO's, but ya know, some of that is the paranoia of the users because of the number of cases against pirates. This is a good thing, unless you own a copy of CD that's scratched to death. Then you have to repurchase it on amazon or itunes. At least most of them are only ten bucks. I purchased a good bit of music around Christmas time for myself and family from Amazon.com in digital form. It's nice because they store it for you. I'm also a prime subscriber so there is a vast number of movies available for free, plus 2 day delivery so I don't have to drive to the mall and up the gas prices for my neighbors who drive back and forth all day long for little pay. I'm not loaded, but it's come in handy in this hard time. Fix a few computers here and there, but I'm supposed to lay off the computer more because I may be having seizure activity. Surf responsibly, if you don't own the rights, down let yourself get served with a ten million dollar lawsuit for 12 songs. One thing I found somewhat comical about it was that they punish so greatly, when people are doing almost the same thing they did in the 1980's when the VCR was invented, recording movies off of HBO I see.
high P2P traffic shares.' In the U.S. legal content delivery has flourished...
Please, let's not buy into this bullshit that P2P traffic is not and cannot also be used for legal content delivery
That's called aiding and abetting RIAA's theft of technical terminology.
Could it be... just MAYBE... these "torrenteers" (as I myself used to be..) have discovered NZB's? No seeding, faster downloads, supports encrypted streams... Overall, much better. Only down side, it's harder to provide files. Releasers need to have a brain. Erm... or so I'm told, of course...
The reason BitTorrent traffic is falling is that everybody's downloaded all the old movies already. So now we're just getting the new ones, not catching up on backlog.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's probably the switch to mp4 that's causing the drop, tv episodes that used to be 150mb are now ofter under 100mb, same for movies and other releases.
If piracy seems down (assuming that all the reduced BitTorrent traffic is piracy) it's either because people have discovered another way, it's being hidden better, or it's simply taking place offline. When I was a kid, and software came on floppy disks, I knew people who shared games, and either copied them if it was possible, or just played and then passed the game to someone else in trade. Kinda puff puff pass back in the olden days.
If someone set up a completely separate network that was not hooked to the internet at all, either using old-style BBS or some other means, how would they detect that?
I wonder how hard it would be to do that...
I like how people can just make up stats for things. I know for a fact people are STILL unhappy with movies and music. But this lie is trying to tell people they need to stop because people around them are stopping. Like passive aggressive peer pressure. And the sad thing is there is a portion of people who actually fell for it. And it also uses nationalism too. Claiming america's enemies are doing it more making it a no no to those who support democracy. Download a shit movie you support terrorism...even tho it's doesn't actually make anyone money or support anything but ones desire to know what they are buying...but still, they say it is, and why would the government or it's agencies ever lie to you?
People will actually pay for things if you give them cheap and easy legal alternatives just like they said they would? SHOCKER!
So how about you put all your shit on Netflix and Hulu then you get money and people watch it legally instead of pirating it, studios? We're getting there, but not nearly close enough.
If you consider that average bittorent files have gotten larger due to faster encoding computers, faster upload speeds, cheaper large storage, etc then it's even more drastic of a drop off.
My opinion is that most new stuff hasn't even been worth downloading. Several of the "blockbuster" movies that I've downloaded I deleted within 15 minutes. For other people I think Netflix and Redbox are an acceptable alternative as well.
Horse shit.
The decrease (if there really is one) is more then likely a result of ISPs hopping between the sheets with the MPAA and RIAA--ISPs are now an enforcement arm of those groups in that the ISPs are now sending threatening emails to those that have downloaded torrents that were tracked. They simply threaten to disconnect you (yes, I've received one, and yes, I ignored it).
Comcast used to simply limit P2P downloads (throttling caps). Now they throw a steady stream of reset packets in there during prime time.
So, the headline should read "ISP and Recording Industry Extortion Tactics Successful".
I wish just ONE industry leader would ask ME how all of their gyrations have effected me and my spending habits (really simple answer--I stopped buying games and music altogether. I play old games now, and I make my own music or listen to local performers).
Nice. We shall free the slaves! But not by actually telling them they are free, that way we avoid to much hassle.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This reminded me of something I saw on Faszbook the other day (safe for work).
"All time low" means I have downloaded all the movies and TV shows I could ever want, so now I'm seeding at unprecedented rates.
Since .mp4 is now the default what used to be 550 MB video files are now 407 MB.
Is this the "traffic" the article is citing?
Bingo: I think Netflix is the answer here. Why should I bother using BitTorrent to download some 20-year-old movie when there's a 75% chance that it's on Netflix's instant play selection? Netflix is much easier to use than BitTorrent, and for stuff that isn't super popular, it's far faster (it can take days for something to download on BT if there aren't a lot of seeders, maybe weeks if there's only a few people who have it), since it's actually "instant" as the name says.
Of course, there's still a fair amount of stuff Netflix doesn't have on Instant Play, which means you have to get the DVD, but there's Redbox for that, or the Netflix DVD service if you want to wait a couple days. And then there's a small amount of stuff that isn't on Netflix at all, though it's doubtful that's on BitTorrent too, but it's a possibility.
As people have been saying for ages, people don't resort to piracy nearly as much when cheap, legal options are available. Netflix is less than $10/month for all you can watch out of their Instant Play selection. But Netflix isn't available outside the US (except Canada, I believe), so of course people in other countries stick with BT.
I just love how the article begins- "First time accepted submitter..."
Is this some kind of backhand compliment? "Hey, you sucked before, but we'll let you submit something now." I don't know, it just seems an odd way of pointing this out.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Netflix is available in Costa Rica for the last 6 months or so. Their selection is piss poor. I wasn't happy with it in the US, but the Costa Rican is terrible.
There is Amazon though. My problem with these is that they are not 1080p and none of them carry 3D (something you want in 720p at least without encoding artifacts .....
The traffic pattern is the symptom of the media industry's core problem.
The overall quality of output has now fallen to such a low, that more and more of it isn't even worth steeling any more.