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)
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."
1 - Nothing released recently is worth getting..
2 - Proxies/darknets
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The new season of Breaking Bad has yet to air.
I and many people I know have been getting seed boxes. I think more torrent traffic is just becoming encrypted.
"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's lose-lose for us. BitTorrent numbers go down, *AA's go "hey, look, our methods are working. Now to turn up the heat even more!". If the numbers go up, they say "our current methods aren't working, we need to get even more strict and ruthless." Either way, we lose.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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
Only minor share of P2P is used for legal purposes. Most of it is warez.
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.
Many of the game distributors use P2P as well - in the specific case of BitTorrent, for example Blizzard, Square-Enix and anyone who uses the Pando Media Booster (NCSoft, Riot Games, ...) are using it to deliver the games and their patches. Given the popularity of games like WoW, Diablo III or League of Legends, that's not really a "minor share"