Netflix, Youtube Surpass 50% Mark of Internet Traffic

First time accepted submitter sqorbit writes "Netflix and Youtube are gaining ground not only on the competition, such as Amazon, but also over peer-to-peer file sharing. Netflix claims more than 30 million customers and believes it could double that number in the future. Traffic from Netflix and Youtube amounted to over 50% of Internet traffic in September. Meanwhile Bittorrent traffic is down slightly (7.4% from 10%) in Internet traffic compared to last year. Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?"

Comments

Build it

[Anonymous Coward]

... and they will come.

Re:Build it

[Anonymous Coward]

As my boss reminds me: give a 110%. All the percentages must go up!

Re:Build it

[TheResilientFarter]

Yep. Torrents are for porn.

Re:Build it

[c0lo]

As my boss reminds me: give a 110%. All the percentages must go up!

No, not all. For instance: the percentage of increase for wages - those must go down, India's waiting.

Re:Build it

[Anonymous Coward]

The Internet is for porn.

Re:Build it

[reub2000]

The tube sites have everyone covered for a few millenniums worth of porn. Who needs torrents?

Re:Build it

[Chalnoth]

Yup. But sadly, I imagine the movie studios will take away the opposite conclusion: that their anti-piracy efforts are working.

Re:Build it

[Anonymous Coward]

Low quality shit-clips. For those of discerning taste, torrents are the way to go.

Re:Build it

[Anonymous Coward]

And also they will find out that piracy has grown up by another 300%
Just because, fuck you!

Re:Build it

[Jane Q. Public]

Yep. Torrents are for porn.

Sorry, just no.

Torrents are the ideal distribution system for open source software, for just one example, and are the preferred method of distribution by many major open source software organizations. Large data files (if public) are also often shared via BitTorrent.

OneSwarm and other systems are set up around "darknets" that use the BitTorrent protocol, and BitTorrent Sync is something I would keep my eye on if I were you.

Re: Build it

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, maybe it has.

Re:Build it

[Anonymous Coward]

Truly you must be a man of taste and caliber if you will settle for nothing less than a 1080p rip of "High Ho, High Ho, It's Up Your Arse We Go".

Re:Build it

[Anonymous Coward]

The tube sites are full of amateur porn and clips. Now that's many people's preferences. But some people must really like the full length professional stuff. They keep making it, and somewhere, people are buying it. If you are into the professional stuff, but don't want to pay for it, you need torrents.

Re:Build it

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was earlier in the internet life, I'd say you have the wrong spelling of "come."

Re:Build it

[dave420]

They might be the ideal distribution system for OSS, but they're not used for that nearly as much as the other use you seem to not appreciate.

Re:Build it

[AmiMoJo]

Half of YouTube is pirate copyright material.

Most people don't care about copyright. The MAFIAA have already lost, no-one gives a shit about their poor bleeding profit margins or abstract concepts of intellectual property.

Re:Build it

[Anonymous Coward]

Was that the pre-runner for "Yankee on my doodle it's a dandy"?

Re:Build it

[jellomizer]

I love it how they group together things so they can make large news making percentage.

Re:Build it

[CCarrot]

The tube sites are full of amateur porn and clips. Now that's many people's preferences. But some people must really like the full length professional stuff.

"Hur, hur, h-...Sorry."
    -- Caleb the Ripper

Re:Build it

[Jane Q. Public]

but they're not used for that nearly as much as the other use you seem to not appreciate.

It has nothing to do with "what I appreciate". I simply pointed out that it isn't merely "for porn".

The thing about relative measures...

[Anonymous Coward]

Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?

Or is it something that's not a false dichotomy? An increase in Netflix, YouTube traffic will result in a decrease in the amount of bittorrent traffic in terms of percent, even if absolute usage remains the same. Likewise, a decrease in bittorrent traffic will lead to higher percentages for Netflix and YouTube. That doesn't indicate (or rule out) a relationship between the two (i.e. leaving bittorrent behind for Netflix) except in that it is a relative measure.

Re:The thing about relative measures...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are several different aspects here.
One is that the offerings have been better. I have found many more pirated films on youtube in the last year than there has been for a while.
Second is ease of use. It has been nice and easy to go to youtube, look up a film and watch it with no hassle. Personally I can't use netflix - not avaliable in my country, but as I understand it is as easy. And don't bother posting about using vpn's or any other forms of lying about who i am or where I'm from to get it working - the ability to do it easily and legitamately is what we are talking about here.
Third is that the major piraters have have collected most of what they want. This lowers the amount of downloads they are doing.
Fourth is that people are decent - they do want to give people money for their work.
Finally, fifth is that people are have been made aware that they can be quite soundly punished, and that everyone is being watched. It may not be a case of IF you are caught, but whether someone finds records of you doing so and decides to make an example of you.

Re:The thing about relative measures...

[AmiMoJo]

It would be more interesting to know how much time YouTube and Netflix are taking away from normal TV viewing. I find that the amateur documentary type videos on YouTube are better than what the BBC puts out these days, like that Brian Cox twat or Horizon post 1990.

Re:The thing about relative measures...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I have found many more pirated films on youtube in the last year than there has been for a while.... people are decent - they do want to give people money for their work."

Things here no matchee uppee.

Re:The thing about relative measures...

[Unknown1337]

Exactly what I was thinking. Netflix has expanded its coverage of HD and 'super HD' while Youtube has increased the quality/resolution of its content as well. Increased quality comes with increased data transfer, while a 700MB file will always transmit 700MB. The customer base has probably grown and there is likely some relationship between the cost effective viewing and increased usage of these services, but overall they are simply sending more data for the same content which makes this a nearly irrelevant thing to measure. It would be like proving global warming by switching to Fahrenheit when you used to use Celsius... it just doesn't add up and the 2 are not comparable without conversion.

Re:The thing about relative measures...

[hendrikboom]

There's a difference between the number of people posting and the number watching?

-- hendrik

Re:The thing about relative measures...

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS

Re:The thing about relative measures...

[CCarrot]

Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?

Or is it something that's not a false dichotomy? An increase in Netflix, YouTube traffic will result in a decrease in the amount of bittorrent traffic in terms of percent, even if absolute usage remains the same. Likewise, a decrease in bittorrent traffic will lead to higher percentages for Netflix and YouTube. That doesn't indicate (or rule out) a relationship between the two (i.e. leaving bittorrent behind for Netflix) except in that it is a relative measure.

Exactly!

Correlation...causation...ah, f$^# it, you know the rest.

Less torrent traffic

[Anonymous Coward]

Or less torrent traffic you can track?

Survival of the fittest...

Re:Less torrent traffic

[Bengie]

I've seen a lot of other charts that categorize all traffic or it defaults into "other" or "misc" or whatever. Those categories are always small, so unless this new BitTorrent traffic is also invisible packets, it won't be disappearing, just shifting categories. VPN traffic has been going up, which may be largely caused my BitTorrent, but hard to say and still much much less than naked BitTorrent traffic.

Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?
 
Could be that most download hoarders are finally coming to their senses that out of the 250gigs of MP3s they've downloaded they're really only listening to about 2gigs worth? That's my guess... that and the fact that you can only beat off so many times a year so having 65 days of pr0n doesn't make much sense either.
 
Or maybe it's people who've gotten sick of downloading 5 gigs worth of an e-book collection for a single book that's about 6 dollars on Amazon.
 
I know tons of people who've done the bit torrent stockpiling and I've never seen any of them come close to using a double digit percentage of what they've ripped off. It's like the people who get the high end NetFlix package and rip the discs and return them the next day. How many of those discs never get watched? My guess is a ton of them never see the tray of a DVD player.

Re:Hoarders

[FlyHelicopters]

Regarding the DVD ripping, I tried that back when Blockbuster had the "unlimited rentals with in store exchange" deal going on.

They would mail you 3 DVDs, then you would rip them, drop them off at the store the next day and they would give you 3 in store rentals for free in exchange, while at the same time mailing you 3 more.

When it first came out, they didn't wait for the in-store rentals to be returned before mailing the next set of discs. They changed that at some point.

So you could get up to 12 movies a week if you were swapping them every 3 days or so.

After a few months, I had several TB of hard drive space full of movies that... frankly weren't likely to ever be watched.

Then Blu-Ray came out, and the quality there was good enough that it made the ripped copies look like crap. I ended up deleting them. That was a LOT of hours of time wasted.

So yea, the idea that I'll have this huge horde ended up being rather silly. Now I just put the PS3 or Ruku on and stream more content than I will ever have time to watch and life is good.

Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Hulu Plus might not be perfect, they each have their own issues, they don't have "everything", but boy, they sure have enough stuff to keep my family busy most of the time.

Re:Hoarders

[nurb432]

When the commercial outlets drop something out of existence you want due to low demand, you will thank the so-called 'hoarders'.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably not because most of them have no idea what 95% of what they even have and next to none of them share their collection for any period of time. It's cute that you're acting like today's bit torrent hoarder is tomorrows librarian but it's simply not true.
 
Oh, and while I do have a fairly sizable music collection that is 100% RIAA legal, I'm really not going to get upset about not being able to get my hands on some obscure Benny Carter live set from 1957. My life is a bit more about what producing or at least interacting than it is about consumption.
 
My far reaching hope is that since media surrounds us people will lose interest in it. I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen but given the circumstances it's the most I can hope for.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

Then Blu-Ray came out, and the quality there was good enough that it made the ripped copies look like crap. I ended up deleting them. That was a LOT of hours of time wasted.

You should have invested your time in porn, it doesn't have these issues. Once released in crap resolution, it almost always stays there. No rereleases, no bluray upgrades for older titles, and George Lucas doesn't even insert CGI in Star Wars XXX.

Re:Hoarders

[ifiwereasculptor]

I was a hoarder. For me, I guess what happened was that my broadband capacity finally reached a point in which I feel comfortable with stuff being in the cloud. If I wanted to watch Star Trek six years ago on my 800Kbps connection, I'd have to torrent every episode. Then I'd burn discs because, in case I wanted to watch again, I didn't want to go through the trouble of redownloading everything - it took days. Now Netflix and Youtube mean that a lot of what I want is permanently (and readily, thanks to a 35Mbps connection) available and I have no reason to hoard anymore, so my torrenting has decreased a lot. Steam sales and Humble Bundles also meant I have essentially stopped pirating (except for good titles with annoying DRM, like Bioshock 2) - I just give it a year of two for games to come to a reasonable price and leave my library on the cloud. I think that's what happened to a lot of people - and, in third world countries, quite recently.

Re:Hoarders

[hodet]

I don't get digital horders. I have a friend who has TB's and TB's of downloaded crap saved on DVD's and USB Hard drives. Why? He will never watch a fraction of this stuff. All those drives aren't cheap either. I have a $7.99 netflix account and can watch reruns of Star Trek TNG (or thousands of other things) if I feel like it. All at the tip of my fingers 24x7. No need to download 7 season's, and the interface on Netflix is much easier then dicking around with finding an episode you may want to watch three years from now. To each his own I guess.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get digital horders. I have a friend who has TB's and TB's of downloaded crap saved on DVD's and USB Hard drives. Why? He will never watch a fraction of this stuff. All those drives aren't cheap either. I have a $7.99 netflix account and can watch reruns of Star Trek TNG (or thousands of other things) if I feel like it. All at the tip of my fingers 24x7. No need to download 7 season's, and the interface on Netflix is much easier then dicking around with finding an episode you may want to watch three years from now. To each his own I guess.

To play devil's advocate: Netflix's stock got cut by 80% after a couple of stupid corporate decisions. What if they hadn't reversed those decisions and turned their company around?

Having 7 seasons on storage you own and control gives you the problem of backing them up. But it guarantees that they'll be forever available, even after the latest cloud service has gone tits-up due to its own incompetence, been bought out by the MAFIAA, or throttled into oblivion as collateral damage in some war between the cable companies and the telephone companies.

Some content will never be released on DVD or Blu-Ray or NetFlix. 50 years from now, something as "eternal" as ST:TNG may be as unavailable as whatever show ran opposite the Lawrence Welk show (or whatever it was my grandparents used to watch 70 years ago.)

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as AC since I don't want the CISPA to allow a newly minted Ministry Of Copyrights to send their secret police in the near future....

I've stored over a thousand movies either from direct ripping, or downloading good encodes. I have found that on demand (Netflix) does not have a whole lot going in the movie categories. As a result, I have been watching movies again from my archives. I simply refuse to shell out a couple of bucks each time I want to watch something. Fuck them, I paid to see it in the movie theater, I paid to get the DVD copy, how much blood do they want to siphon off me? So, yes, I do store movies to watch them again, or watch them later on with friends and family. Some stuff is just classic.

It just became a way of life to never ever watch the DVD. In fact, the advertisements and POU's pissed me off so fucking much, I had to rip it first. Actually paying for it (Around 30-40% of my collection are purchases) and being told, "No. You can't skip anything here. Sit down. STFU. Watch the previews".

Right after I had the physical medium in hand I put it in my system, fired up DVD Decrypter, and made an image of the disc to be mounted afterwards and played. Plenty of media players like the WD TV Live will play an .iso file replete with DVD menus.

I don't feel that any of the time has been wasted at all. My collection is nearing 100 TB. At this point I rarely use Netflix for anything other than watching TV shows. That's it's real value to me. TV shows with no advertisements or overlays. I can wait a year till the last season is available.

The biggest failure of Big Entertainment is continuing this greedy war. My offer still stands. I will pay upwards of $50 a month for on-demand viewing of TV shows with ZERO advertisements of any kind. Any other deal they can go fuck themselves with a cactus.

P.S - I still do a brisk business with the DVDs by mail. After I download a good encode for a movie I queue it up on Netflix and quite often never take it out the package when I receive it. I'm sending them back as quick as I get them. Netflix for me is way to compensate the artists.

Re:Hoarders

[EdIII]

As a "hoarder", I've documented my collection pretty well. I never burn anything to DVD's or USB hard drives. Everything is networked and available to all devices.

It's about saving the really classic stuff. The real jewels of my collection are all the Disney and Looney Tunes cartoons. Stuff that is just not available on market today due their outright greed and insane copyright mentality. Some of the collections like M*A*S*H I ripped direct from the DVDs themselves.

The real value of my collection? At some point in the future the stuff I have, while classic, will not be readily available. My collection, nearing triple digit TB's, will be easily duplicated and shared.

My cartoon collection alone is very hard to come by. My younger relatives love to be able to watch Donald Duck and his nephews. Sadly, Disney being the douchenozzles they are have adamantly refused to share those cartoons with today's children.

Re:Hoarders

[WaffleMonster]

Could be that most download hoarders are finally coming to their senses that out of the 250gigs of MP3s they've downloaded they're really only listening to about 2gigs worth? That's my guess

Your a fool if you only listen to 2gigs worth of MP3's you'll end up hating all of your favorite songs before the year is out.

Re:Hoarders

[fafalone]

As a hoarder, my downloading has slowed down quite a bit. I've downloaded every TV show and movie I'd ever be interested in watching, in HD if available. Now the only downloading I do is new episodes or new movies (and of course when something I like comes out higher quality). I am indeed quite satisfied with my 10TBs of 281 movies and 82 full series.

But streaming/pay services for video in their current form will never see a penny from me. For the way I consume media, their shortcomings are a deal breaker:

• Streaming is wholly unacceptable since it requires an internet connection. Offline viewing, and viewing without "buffering..." if it drops out for a minute, is important. Even "1080p" streams are noticeably worse than actual Blurays (and 12gb rips for that matter). Streaming should be AN option, not the only one.
• Permanent copies in a non-DRM'd format are still not the norm for movies/tv. They haven't learned from music.
• There's no excuse for such poor selections and different services offering different things. It's a blatant example of corporate greed preventing what consumers want.
• So are all types of geographic limitations/delays.
• Even more infuriating is when items available are removed from the service. And when the service itself up and shuts down.

None of these are limits of technology, and all of these are why legit offerings can't compete with illegal ones, regardless of price. Fix all of those, and add what is lacking in pirated sources (bonus materials, dl speed on some stuff, ease of access), and you'll find that like audio, legit video can also successfully compete with free.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

I might not have a large enough collection to qualify as a "hoarder" for this thread, but personally, I use BitTorrent instead of NetFlix because it is way easier. If I want to watch something, I just open up the file on my computer and hit play (I have a folder named "tv" with a folder for each show; it's not a complicated scheme to maintain and episodes are easy to find). If I want to watch something on an airplane or at a friend's place, I just have to copy it to a computer or flash drive and I'm all set; I don't have to worry about internet connectivity.

Re:Hoarders

[spire3661]

I have focused on making sure my video system can patch up any holes in the streamers lineups, rather then a massive bulk collection.

Re:Hoarders

[spire3661]

The netflix version of TNG looks like crap compared to the Blu-Ray re-masters. Also, things disappear off Netflix. After King of the Hill disappeared, i DLed the whole series.

Re:Hoarders

[spire3661]

This guy gets it. I am doing the exact same thing, hoarding the stuff that greed tries to lock away.

Re:Hoarders

[FlyHelicopters]

All of your points and concerns are fair and reasonable, I totally understand them.

In my comment, I said that the services today aren't perfect, they are missing some things (like off-line viewing).

But for most people, they are good enough.

People like you will always exist, that's fine, the fact that most people just pay Netflix $8 a month means that the media companies might actually start ignoring you at some point, rather than fighting a pointless crusade against you (that they can't win).

I agree re: the music, I never bought any music back when it was DRM, but I've bought my fair share of music since they dropped it. Amazon has offered a number of cheap deals on MP3s, I probably have over 100 albums purchased via Amazon now, because they are cheap and because they'll play anywhere.

I don't require my digital copies to play anywhere quite so much, we watch movies on the TV, not the iPad, but I can see how some people might want to do that.

I suspect it will come, 5-10 years from now, we might get DRM free movies and TV shows. I suspect sales will go up and piracy will actually go down, if the prices are reasonable.

A buck an episode, 3-5 bucks for a movie, at those prices, I'll just buy everything, and I suspect most people would too.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

Yyyyyyyyeahhhh. How's that working out for you? Netflix streaming quality leaves a lot to be desired compared to a high-quality Blu-Ray rip.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

All those drives aren't cheap either. I have a $7.99 netflix account and...

Aren't cheap? Yes they are. Very cheap.

That $7.99/mo+tax Netflix account will cost you $100 over the course of one year, and none of that is an investment — all of it disappears.

If instead you buy a 2TB external hard drive, for almost exactly the same price, you could store thousands of movies and TV episodes at Netflix streaming quality. AND you'd get to keep the drive afterwards, and drives are usually good for 5 years or so.

Just sayin'.

Re:Hoarders

[FlyHelicopters]

Steam has not been kind to my credit card. :)

Those steam sales are addicting! But you know what? I no longer pirate games. I used to have hundreds and hundreds of games stashed away for the day I *might* play them, and I did play some of them.

I haven't pirated a game in years, just wait a year (sometimes 3 months), Steam will have that $50 game on sale for $20 (or less).

As of this minute, my Steam account has 1,638 games in my "all games list".

I've probably actually played 10% of them, but some of them were *deals!*. :) A lot of them were $1-3 games or were part of one of those $5 bundles for 8-10 games. Some of them of course were Humble Bundle games as well.

I did pay full price for CoD: Ghosts, one of the very, very few games I really wanted to play at launch, but my general rule is I won't pay over $10 for most games, I just add them to my wishlist, I figure they'll go on sale sooner or later.

Re:Hoarders

[FlyHelicopters]

What is the cost in time and money to maintain 100 TB of videos?

I used to have eight 3TB hard drives in my home server, storing all my downloaded and ripped videos.

Back when I started in 2006, it was 1TB drives, then 1.5TB drives (Frys had a deal on them back then, $115!). Then 2TB, then 3TB.

I looked at upgrading to 4TB drives, then something caused me to do the math. All the money spent to keep up with it? I could have just bought most of it on Blu-Ray and been done with it.

My local media storage is down to 6.8TB, I've deleted about 10TB worth in the past few months, waste of time, space, and money.

You know what? I don't miss any of it.

What I did keep was stuff that isn't easy to find on the popular services. I have a number of old war movies and documentaries that aren't on the various services, those I kept. I have the complete rip of 10 seasons of Modern Marvels, that is pretty cool and nice for the kids.

Blockbuster movies? Blah, I can stream those, Amazon Prime Video these days looks darn good on the big TV.

Re:Hoarders

[FlyHelicopters]

The problem with that idea is that the easy to download stuff on TPB is current popular stuff.

If I want to download The Hunger Games, that is easy.

If I want to download some rare TV movie from the 80's, my odds are very low that I'll find it.

The hoarders don't keep their entire collections up all the time. That is the great limitation of torrents, you can't really keep 5,000 torrents running all the time.

Re:Hoarders

[FlyHelicopters]

I should start the "Netflix of Porn", just turn it into an $8/month service where you can stream almost anything. :)

Re:Hoarders

[lgw]

I fear you're right. Netflix just keeps dropping older stuff, both from streaming and from DVD. I just don't get it.

I don't want to torrent anything! It's just crazy that no one will take my money to stream me the vast back catalog of titles that have entered the digital domain.

It's time for mandatory licensing of older works. You know what - I'm OK with 100 year copyright if after 10 works fall under some FRAND scheme and all the Netflix's of the world get to stream them for a nominal fee.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

My collection, nearing triple digit TB's, . . .

Very impressive. Nice work.

Re:Hoarders

[jxander]

Similar theory: the majority of people who are going to torrent already have their libraries full, regardless of how much they're watching said library

TPB is famous enough that anyone even remotely in tune with the internet at large could easily figure out how to download the complete James Bond collection, or whatever they fancy. But once they have that (and the complete Star Trek collection, Game of Thrones, etc) there isn't as much of a glut. Just steadily downloading new stuff as it becomes available.

Re:Hoarders

[EdIII]

FRAND would be the most sane thing to do.

You take world wide distribution digitally at an annual cost of around $100 (adjusting for local economies) and that adds up to a shitload of residuals for the artists. Can you fucking imagine how much money Disney cartoons, The Three Stooges, M*A*S*H, etc. would generate at that volume?

There is so much good content that has been created that is considered classic, cult classic, etc.

Unfortunately, they want to force feed you the newer content at ever increasing rates. Having quality hand picked older content that stands the test of time and multiple generations cannot be allowed to compete with the crap of today that is only a vehicle for marketing.

Re:Hoarders

[zugmeister]

Netflix to the rescue! Offer to share your disks in exchange for borrowing someone else's stuff. Does Amazon have a used copy? Ebay? Check Redbox when the Library doesn't have it and can't get it.
If you really want something, find it and make your own copy. Don't wait for someone else to just give it to you.

Re:Hoarders

[drinkypoo]

FRAND would be the most sane thing to do.

The most sane thing to do would be to restore the original term for Copyright. Life moves faster now, but copyrights expire slower. That is obviously bullshit.

Re:Hoarders

[rikkards]

I was doing the same thing with zip.ca up here for a while but stopped after a bit. Zip is another company that is bringing out streaming real soon now (which they have been saying for over 4 years which is why I went to Netflix.ca).

My biggest issue with netflix is they need to have a way of limiting out movies that went straight to DVD. Trying to find a good horror movie that I haven't seen and pretty much all of them are done with HD handi-cams and contain porn-level acting at best.

On a side note, of the movies I have intentionally gone looking for I had to revert back to Netflix Canada rather than US as they were not available in the US one. Very strange.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

With me personally, I find the quality better. Granted, it is annoying that it takes Netflix about a minute to determine that your network can support the SuperHD version and not the crappy default dial-up-quality video, but a 1080p television show stream from Netflix is way better than the stuff captured on bittorrent at 1080i, downrezed and compressed into a 350 meg file (blech!). I used to turn to bittorrent for foreign television shows, but I can get most of those on Youtube now? Why torrent eBooks when there are so many free and cheap alternatives? I mean, what is up with paying $2-$3 for an eBook if I don't have to run it through Calibre, convert it to Word, fix the formatting and run spelling checks, convert in Calibre back to ePub, download to my eReader..... Oh wait, I could have paid a couple of bucks for this thing, been legal, and it guarenteed to be good quality from the getgo? What did I just waste all that time on? I can spend all this time on different sites trying to find a torrent of an album, worried about getting sued, to save a couple of bucks, or I can pay a flat subscription fee and stream all the music I want, and not have to take up valuable space on my memory card on my phone or harddrive - and its legal. I know which one I am choosing.

In a nutshell, what has happened is that the entertainment industry has finally listened to consumer demands, and while we had some bumpy roads getting from here to there, it works rather well. You offer customers better quality than they can pirate, guarantee it to work, offer a great selection of content, and charge a reasonable monthly subscription?

Truthfully, about the only things I still pirate are foreign television shows that Netflix hasn't picked up the distribution rights yet (not Anime, I got CrunchyRoll for that).Everything else there is a legal option that is cheap enough that I don't mind handing over a few bucks to get better quality than the stuff on ThePirateBay.

Now, if only the software industry could only figure out a decent subscription method (or lower the prices on some of their products - REALLY Adobe, you charge that much?), maybe they would start seeing more gains. And if Gamefly can figure out how to stream games like Netflix streams movies, I am all in. You know, THAT is what Sony and Microsoft need to offer - a monthly flat subscription rate that allows you to play games from their store for free (something like PS+ but better).

I've been saying it for $15 years - I don't mind paying for stuff if you can give it to me in a format I want for a reasonable price, and if you don't I will pirate said material. Sounds like the industry has finally listened.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like the Facebook of Sex!

Re:Hoarders

[AmiMoJo]

that and the fact that you can only beat off so many times a year so having 65 days of pr0n doesn't make much sense either.

Challenge accepted.

Re:Hoarders

[AmiMoJo]

These days torrents are fast, and of course there is Usenet. Some stuff I had to work a little to get I keep, but if I decided I wanted to watch almost any modern movie this evening I could have downloaded before I get home from work.

Re:Hoarders

[nurb432]

True, people with obscure collections are not up 24/7, but they at least have a copy safely stored away and it can be returned back to the community pool at some point.

Re:Hoarders

[Bengie]

100TB collection, over 1,000 movies so assuming 1500 movies, that's an AVERAGE of 68GB per movie. That's bigger than the average BluRay including commentaries and extras. Did you partially decompress your videos or do you have 100TB of raw storage, but RAID 6 in 10disk groups or something?

You are using ZFS, right? RIGHT?!

Re:Hoarders

[nurb432]

The media that 'surrounds us' currently is trash. This makes it even more important to rescue and protect the classics. Due to the current level of intelligence in society, obscure is 'the good stuff'. In another 15 years if we have lost our 'history', it will be a loss for all.

This also includes books. Especially as more and more move to electronic format only. So much knowledge has been lost due to books fading out before they were rescued.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

How big is your collection or are you not reencoding your videos?

Re:Hoarders

[Kjella]

Or maybe it's people who've gotten sick of downloading 5 gigs worth of an e-book collection for a single book that's about 6 dollars on Amazon.

Actually I think it's the complete opposite, it's the knowledge that yes I'll easily find a torrent that has it and yes the speed will be good, so there's very little reason to hoard it just to have it available or to avoid downloading it again. With the war on piracy it seemed for a while like the good times would come to an end, napster shut down, grokster shut down, winmx shut down, suprnova shut down, grab it now while it's easy because tomorrow it might be harder. With the TPB raid and trial I'd say that was the case no more than five years ago. That and slow speeds, if you want it now then in an hour is very different from in two days. I realized it must be an insanely good movie or series for me to watch it more than twice, if you know all the dialog, the plot twists, the gags I mean some are classics I still zone out way too fast.

I had two friends so around 2001 who tried explaining it to me as they were on a ridiculously fast 100 Mbps campus connection while I had barly gotten DSL - I think less than a megabit. At that time it was rather inconcievable to me how they had no need to hoard because they could just grab whatever they wanted, any time. Today I'm almost there (90Mbit) and I totally get it. I used to have a big maxitower with disks, now I'm down to a half-full miditower and if I really wanted to I could easily live on one SSD and one big HDD. Good series, great series, am I really going to go back and watch season one again? Naaaaaah probably not... ok, delete and if I change my mind later that's no problem.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

100 TB are you sure? I though my collection of little over 1TB was excessive. 1/4 of that is kids DVD's that were purchased and or borrowed from friends. A single DVD rarely takes up more than 4 or 5 GB. 100 TB is a shit ton of content.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

yup been there. done that.

Hulu, Netflix and Youtube keep us going. no issues. for news, got broadcast HD TV...... why (or better, HOW) does cable still exist?

still have my drive full of stuff I watch that isn't available via stream. I own the DVDs, ripped 'em to keep the kids from destroying them. bonus is they can access the content from tablets.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

We are talking about electronic format here. You're trying to derail the conversation.
 
And if the classics aren't accessable today then your army of hoarders have already failed. Case closed.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you were also using tor because posting as AC would hardly protect you against anything...

Re:Hoarders

[lgw]

Life moves faster now

Things every generation ever has said.

There's no need to have a short copyright term (though the recent extensions are silly), instead we need to change what copyright means, so that you can't restrict the distribution or prevent derivative works. I see no problem with the creator continuing to profit for a long time from some creative work, and that was never really the problem (except with children who demand all things for free). The problem comes when copyright blocks further creative progress, and that is fixed by mandatory FRAND licensing.

That's the norm on YouTube today, but we should give it legislative force to eliminate the entire concept of "takedown" for all but quite recent works.

Re:Hoarders

[228e2]

Im glad im not the only one that raised an eyebrow at 100TB of movies maybe 10TB?

The thing that jumped out at me was your point of Big Entertainment continuing this greedy war and yet you've (supposedly) amassed 100TB's of which less than half you've paid for. Netflix is $10 a month, my cable package lets me DVR all I want for less than $40 a month, then theres Hulu, RedBox and a bunch of other services i've never heard of but are equally as cheap. I have an easy 2TB's of movies over the past 10 years i've accumulated and i'll admit theres a whole bunch ive never even unzipped, not to mention watched. I think you're just being a greedy hoarder, sorry.

Re:Hoarders

[odigity]

It's time for mandatory licensing of older works.

WTF?

You want to fix problems caused by government laws (the use of force against people who pattern their bits a certain way) by more government laws (more force, this time against people pretending they can own a pattern of bits)?

Why not just get rid of the original stupid law?

Re:Hoarders

[ewibble]

100TB is a lot of movies, and would cost a lot of money to maintain 25 hard drives (4 TB each) (no backups) a couple are bound to die each year. Plus the cost of powering them must get expensive. I agree he is a hoarder there is no way he is actually going to watch all those movies. But greedy I don't know? He has probably spent more money on hording than a normal person would pay to watch the movies. Storing those movies does not really deprive anybody else the ability to watch them.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the cost in time and money to maintain 100 TB of videos?

I used to have eight 3TB hard drives in my home server, storing all my downloaded and ripped videos.

Back when I started in 2006, it was 1TB drives, then 1.5TB drives (Frys had a deal on them back then, $115!). Then 2TB, then 3TB.

I looked at upgrading to 4TB drives, then something caused me to do the math. All the money spent to keep up with it? I could have just bought most of it on Blu-Ray and been done with it.

Really? Where are you getting all these BluRays for $15 or less? Inquiring minds want to know!

Consider the numbers:
4 TB drive right now (consumer grade) ~ $0.04 per GB (you can get them for cheaper on sale, but I'll assume $175 per drive)

Assume you had to set up a system maybe 3 times, and the cost per GB each time has gone down by roughly half, so...

First set of drives (1 TB drives) cost $0.175 per GB, second set (2 TB, really, who bought 1.5 TB drives?? :) costs $0.085 per GB and final set (4 TB drives) costs $0.04 per GB. Total over (five, ten?)years = approx. $0.30 per GB. (This also assumes that you completely toss each old set of drives, instead of re-using them for music / photo / home video / seldom accessed media storage, etc.)

Typical fully-utilized blu-ray media, uncompressed = 50GB.

Storage cost of blu-ray media in hardware = $0.30 * 50 = $15. Compress them even a little bit, and cost per media item goes down even further. (On a side note: cost per full DVD at 7.5 GB per disc = $2.25)

I don't know what numbers you used, but these ones are pretty clear.

Re:Hoarders

[ewibble]

While I agree with limiting distribution and derivative works are the main problem, I really see no need in having long lasting copyright either, all works have a significant input from society, that created them and as long as you are limiting them in some way you are limiting their distribution and derivations.

Any licensing fee even a small discourages derivative works, face it all works are derivative. You end up reinventing the wheel. Imagine a world in which we had to pay the inventor of the wheel descendants a percentage of you product say something reasonable like 1% per wheel you used. After all a car wouldn't work with out a wheel would it. Put that together with every other component you used in the thing you probably end up with more than 100%, and you would pay your accountants and lawyers a lot of money to figure out who and what to pay.

How would we send our children to school to learn ideas that somebody else has already come up with?

The only thing that should be long lived is the right to claim an creation as your creation (basically trademark), also not yours you don't want someone using your name to sell dodgy products. Most people want to pay the original creator for their work some money, they just won't do it without bound.

It is fair to allow the creator to profit from the creation of content, but it is also fair and beneficial eventually return that content back to the society that inspired it. No one needs to be paid for the rest of their life for a creation that took a couple of hours to create. We need a fairer system maybe something that ties duration of copyright/patient to amount invested.

Re:Hoarders

[lgw]

I really see no need in having long lasting copyright either, all works have a significant input from society, that created them and as long as you are limiting them in some way you are limiting their distribution and derivations.

Just in general, any time there's a spectrum of ways to do things, and you find yourself arguing for one extreme end of the spectrum because the other extreme end of the spectrum is bad, you should stop and reconsider.

. No one needs to be paid for the rest of their life for a creation that took a couple of hours to create

Depends how impressive it was. But most works worth discussing are a year's work, by one or a vast team of people.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped copying the DVDs from my rental service when I realised that even circa 2005-06 it was barely worth my time pirating by the time I'd received, ripped, re-encoded (*), copied and returned them.

I just ended up buying them! DVDs were already getting- what seemed- really cheap then, but I've seen some of the things I bought way, way cheaper since. Really, just not worth the hassle of copying.

Mind you, we're talking about stuff that was from box sets (which tended to work out less expensive than single or double disc films etc.), but even so, I doubt I'd waste my time with it again in most cases.

There's also the fact that I don't really watch the DVDs I do have, and I don't even have many compared to most people...

(*) This was when dual layers were still pretty blooming expensive, circa UK £3-5 IIRC.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS?! Phht!
Everyone knows FAT32 is the best filesystem for movies, for cross device compatibility.

Re:Hoarders

[CCarrot]

Yyyyyyyyeahhhh. How's that working out for you? Netflix streaming quality leaves a lot to be desired compared to a high-quality Blu-Ray rip.

Er, even compared to a compressed-to-crap DVD rip, you mean?

Don't get me wrong, Netflix is great for TV shows and older movies, but anything remotely cinematic (i.e., Life of Pi or The Hobbit)? Good luck getting something from Netflix that does it justice, especially during peak viewing hours. Get everybody together to watch them at 3:00 am on a Wednesday, you might be okay...

Re:Hoarders

[lgw]

To maintain the ability to earn a living making creative works. Sure, maybe some radically different system might be better, but likely any given one isn't.

Re:Hoarders

[CCarrot]

I don't require my digital copies to play anywhere quite so much, we watch movies on the TV, not the iPad, but I can see how some people might want to do that.

Would be nice to not have to re-purchase content when you change devices, though, wouldn't it? If the format you have doesn't work for your new toy, re-encode!

Music has been through this hassle already, since mp3's have been around since the 90's and people have fought to be able to migrate their collections across multiple devices. Digital video will be facing the same issues very soon here, as it becomes more ubiquitous and viewing devices age out / new formats become standard.

I suspect it will come, 5-10 years from now, we might get DRM free movies and TV shows. I suspect sales will go up and piracy will actually go down, if the prices are reasonable.

A buck an episode, 3-5 bucks for a movie, at those prices, I'll just buy everything, and I suspect most people would too.

Add to that list "make it as convenient as iTunes" and yes, I suspect you're right. Parents will give their kids gift cards for Christmas, like they do for iTunes now, and let them manage their own content. Sure, there will be some file swapping, as there is for music now, but a) ready accessibility and b) reasonable price, with some degree of certainty that it will not disappear or get yanked back tomorrow even if you have to change out your entire system, will drive the numbers of purchases up and up. iTunes is starting to see this a bit in their video sales, however you still have to put up with vendor lockdown and lack of transferability (not an option for me, I don't have any iDevices at all much less an overpriced Apple TV box).

Right now, Netflix is kinda the Spotify of the video world, with no real iTunes (or Google Music, or Amazon Music, etc.) equivalent. Not only is this hammering network infrastructure needlessly, it is providing the customers with a very 'meh' experience when they do finally get to see your year-old content on super-squeezed bandwidth.

Re:Hoarders

[Bengie]

Once you start looking into 2TB SAS drives to use with your LSI controller that's in your FreeBSD+ZFS box, then duplicate everything twice for a back-up, plus the cost of an off-site back-up. Why uses SAS? Port expanders.

Suddenly my starting cost went up.

Re:Hoarders

[mcgrew]

I'm OK with 100 year copyright if after 10 works fall under some FRAND scheme and all the Netflix's of the world get to stream them for a nominal fee.

I'm not. Art is like tech or science, in that what is new builds on what is old. The reason I haven't put The Paxil Diaries in print and for sale is because of a single poem with 24 words written half a century ago by a dead woman. That chapter revolves around the poem and its place in the Illinois State Library. If I publish that book, the dead poet's rich heirs will surely sue the living shit out of me.

That poem should be in the public domain. Long copyright terms harm culture. There's no valid reason whatever for terms to be as insanely long as they are.

Re:Hoarders

[lgw]

I'm not sure you got my point. If you had to pay 5% of book sales to the estate of that dead woman for a no-limits license for your derivative works, and you didn't need to obtain this license ahead of time, doesn't that unblock you?

Re:Hoarders

[mcgrew]

5% of sales of a 200+ page book for 24 words? That's insane. You think I get all $24.95 for a copy of Nobots??

Re:Hoarders

[drinkypoo]

Just in general, any time there's a spectrum of ways to do things, and you find yourself arguing for one extreme end of the spectrum because the other extreme end of the spectrum is bad, you should stop and reconsider.

Extreme depends on where you're standing. The first "copyright" law on the books related to the library at Alexandria. Pass through the harbor, you have to permit copying of any books you have on hand. That was intended to preserve and promote works. What we have today is the opposite. Today's copyright law actively works against saving these materials for posterity. I'd say that arguing for modern copyright is arguing for one extreme end of the spectrum. On the other end, there's copyright which serves the people. In the middle, there's no copyright at all.

Re:Hoarders

[drinkypoo]

Things every generation ever has said.

Things which have been true for every generation! Well, there were some setbacks scientifically, but those people generally had to deal with a lot of strife so they weren't really wrong.

There's no need to have a short copyright term (though the recent extensions are silly),

Right, and all I'm doing is arguing against the extensions.

instead we need to change what copyright means, so that you can't restrict the distribution or prevent derivative works

I'm not seeing why your plan is better than my plan.

I see no problem with the creator continuing to profit for a long time from some creative work,

I see two problems. The first problem is a problem for society. The purpose of copyright is to promote works. But permitting someone to profit from a long time from a work doesn't promote more work, it promotes resting on laurels. The other problem is that once the material enters the collective subconscious, it really ought to belong to all of us. If you can't get it out of your life, it shouldn't be permitted to belong to a corporation. That doesn't actually benefit anyone except the corporation's shareholders. And Disney has been making damned sure that doesn't happen for quite some time now.

The problem comes when copyright blocks further creative progress, and that is fixed by mandatory FRAND licensing.

I disagree strenuously. It is fixed by reasonably copyright terms, where those terms are much shorter than a human lifespan — as they were originally. The terms were not extended to benefit the people, but to benefit corporate interests.

Re:Hoarders

[lgw]

Ahh, well, if you won't give up 5% for the creative work that your commentary is centered on, then I have little sympathy.

Re:Hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?

Could be that most download hoarders are finally coming to their senses that out of the 250gigs of MP3s they've downloaded they're really only listening to about 2gigs worth? That's my guess... that and the fact that you can only beat off so many times a year so having 65 days of pr0n doesn't make much sense either.

Or maybe it's people who've gotten sick of downloading 5 gigs worth of an e-book collection for a single book that's about 6 dollars on Amazon.

I know tons of people who've done the bit torrent stockpiling and I've never seen any of them come close to using a double digit percentage of what they've ripped off. It's like the people who get the high end NetFlix package and rip the discs and return them the next day. How many of those discs never get watched? My guess is a ton of them never see the tray of a DVD player.

i only download stuff but never watch it because i am too busy downloading to watch any of the stuff i have downloaded.

Re:Hoarders

[mcgrew]

24 words out of 50,000 is worth 5%? You suck at math.

Re:Hoarders

[lgw]

If the poem isn't important to your work, then don't include it in your work. If it is important to your work, what's 5%?

Re:Hoarders

[mcgrew]

It's important to that chapter, and I'm still waiting to break even on the one I just published. 24 words? I won't publish. TPB has it if anyone wants to read it.

26 percent != "slightly"

[Anonymous Coward]

26% drop in torrent traffic is significant, not "slight".

Re:26 percent != "slightly"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a drop in torrent traffic, it's a drop in percentage. It could have gone up on an absolute scale, but if the total grew faster, then the percentage that it occupies still goes down.

Re:26 percent != "slightly"

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes perfect sense. mod me oblivious and you cognizant.

Thanks Google

[Powercntrl]

I was indifferent about YouTube until it inexplicably linked itself to my Gmail account and now wants me to create a Google+ page in order to comment on videos. Now, I'd like nothing more to see it go up in flames, like a Tesla that hit some road debris.

Re:Thanks Google

[Anonymous Coward]

YouTube comments don't even show up anymore on my Firefox 3.x... YouTube is now much much more pleasant to watch. I don't even have an account, I just bookmark the channels I'm most interested in and visit them for new videos when I'm in the mood.

Re:Thanks Google

[Rick Zeman]

I was indifferent about YouTube until it inexplicably linked itself to my Gmail account and now wants me to create a Google+ page in order to comment on videos. Now, I'd like nothing more to see it go up in flames, like a Tesla that hit some road debris.

I compensated for that by deleting my YouTube channel account. I encourage every one else to do the same.

Re:Thanks Google

[Forever Wondering]

Sounds like you're logged into gmail when you go to youtube.

Logout [of gmail] first [possibly clearing some cookies] and you'll have no problem. I have a gmail account [but I only access it through POP3/IMAP from thunderbird--thus, it's never logged in] and I don't have the same problem. I did have the same problem one time when I was logged into gmail.

If you'd rather not logout/login on gmail repeatedly, you can create a separate browser profile [Firefox, at least] for youtube, etc.

Re:Thanks Google

[Anonymous Coward]

I was indifferent about YouTube until it inexplicably linked itself to my Gmail account and now wants me to create a Google+ page in order to comment on videos. Now, I'd like nothing more to see it go up in flames, like a Tesla that hit some road debris.

I compensated for that by deleting my YouTube channel account. I encourage every one else to do the same.

All of youtube needs to be deleted.

Re:Thanks Google

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a way around it. I managed to do it, but I don't remember how. It keeps trying to make me use my Google+ one though. Google is going to burn themselves. You can't push your agenda on your users. They can and will not participate.

Re:Thanks Google

[Anonymous Coward]

For the past couple of years, everything that the major tech companies have done, has been done for their own benefit rather than to provide value to their users. Nobody asked Apple for iOS 7. Nobody asked Microsoft for Metro on desktop PCs. Nobody asked Google to 'integrate' YouTube and Google Plus and GMail and God knows what else.

Eventually this behavior is going to catch up with these major companies. All it will take are some good alternatives, and markets excel at providing alternatives.

Re:Thanks Google

[Nerdfest]

Out of curiosity, why does it bother you? I consider it a great feature (the single account, not the nagging). I don't imagine it makes much of a difference to Google one way or the other with respect to information collection.

Re:Thanks Google

[EdIII]

Don't just delete your account. That does nothing.

TRANSFER ALL OF IT TO VIMEO OR AN EQUIVALENT

One of the biggest things that pisses me off is that I had to deal with the absolute suck that is the YouTube API and develop automated content creation and BI platforms that used YouTube. Google (surprise it has something to do with OAUTH) deprecated YouTube API v2. Now you have zero ability to fully automate anything with YouTube.

Why did I have to do this in the first place? Businesses are under the impression that YouTube is the only brand out there and they have to use it to create their presence

The more people that start using a YouTube equivalent the better. .... ...

Of course it will just repeat itself all over at Vimeo some day. Don't marketers and execs fuck up everything at some point?

Re:Thanks Google

[Hokan]

Wow, Google must be really desperate to get people onto it's failing social media (g+) platform.

It's kind of odd, they haven't tried such measures for their earlier social media failures. And especially odd because, till now, YouTube was a social media success!

Re:Thanks Google

[Solandri]

If you'd rather not logout/login on gmail repeatedly, you can create a separate browser profile [Firefox, at least] for youtube, etc.

Or easier yet, use one browser just for logging into gmail, another browser for other stuff.

Re:Thanks Google

[lgw]

Or easier yet, cut the cord to the gmail mothership! There are other webmail products (I'm in the midst of switching to outlook.com). Yahoo and MS may have serve ads, but it's vastly less intrusive than googles omni-present tracking

Re:Thanks Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, is /. really so overrun by Google astroturfer mods these days, downmodding every criticism? I guess that's what happens with a tech-savvy advertising company: protect its image at all costs.

Re:Thanks Google

[Inda]

I never log out of Gmail and Google stopped hassling me about linking YouTube or using my real name a while back. One browser, rarely clear cookies.

Mountains out of mole hills.

Re:Thanks Google

[Keick]

Another easier way to fix the youtube issue is built into almost every browser, incognito mode. Always browse youtube in incognito and it wont matter if your logged into gmail or not.

Re:Thanks Google

[houghi]

I just don't comment on Youtube. Not a big deal.
I am sure very soon I will not be able to watch movies on Youtube, unless I log in. That will be the next step.

I will most likely soon be deleting my gmail account.Instead I now just use my own domain name for email via my provider. fetchmail will get it. ssh access will make me use mutt.

I use gmail as spambox. For that I will use http://www.gmx.com/ who are a great mail provider.

Re:Thanks Google

[Anonymous Coward]

GMX.com is my preferred GMail alternative.

Re:Thanks Google

[CCarrot]

Or easier yet, cut the cord to the gmail mothership! There are other webmail products (I'm in the midst of switching to outlook.com). Yahoo and MS may have serve ads, but it's vastly less intrusive than googles omni-present tracking

Tags and intelligent conversation view / management. That's pretty much all that's keeping me there atm: can't find another service that does either as well as the big G, unfortunately.

One more UI fuckup and that's it, I'm gone. Of course, I think I said that two fuckups ago...*sigh*

Re:Thanks Google

[lgw]

They went one UI fuckup too far for me, and I tried using outlook.com. I was surprised. I don't know what you need in terms of "tags and intelligent conversation view / management", but you might give it a try and see, it does what I needed in that regard (which might be radically different from you) - it has tags and tag-based views, at least. I'm still fiddling with email forwarding so I'm not 100% sure (I like the way gmail works with vanity domain email forwarding, don't know yet about outlook.com), but at least the UI is simple and inoffensive.

Re:Thanks Google

[CCarrot]

They went one UI fuckup too far for me, and I tried using outlook.com. I was surprised. I don't know what you need in terms of "tags and intelligent conversation view / management", but you might give it a try and see, it does what I needed in that regard (which might be radically different from you) - it has tags and tag-based views, at least. I'm still fiddling with email forwarding so I'm not 100% sure (I like the way gmail works with vanity domain email forwarding, don't know yet about outlook.com), but at least the UI is simple and inoffensive.

Interesting, I'll check it out, thanks!

By "intelligent conversation view / management" I mean that all the replies / responses to an email are contained in one scrollable (and printable) view sorted by time received, where you can expand / hide any one reply. Last time I looked, nobody else did it as well, with replies from certain people sometimes getting split off from the main conversation, or grouping them by conversation but then requiring you to open up each email in the conversation separately in order to see the content of the response...but admittedly that was some time ago. They could have gotten better at it in the meantime, for sure!

  And tags...man, I hated tags when I first switched to GMail, but now I couldn't imagine being restricted to a folder-based org structure again. So yeah, it needs to be able to apply tags by filter, easy to add / remove tags, sort by / view by tags and combinations of tags, etc. Oh, and completely custom tags, not just "Priority", "Office", "Personal", etc. And the ability to archive...very smart, that. If you don't want to delete it, but it doesn't need to be in your inbox either, just hit 'archive'...very well done that.

Re:Thanks Google

[lgw]

I don't have enough going on yet to see how outlook.com handles conversations, but MS is foolish if it hasn't gotten there yet! I like that the MS one has both folders and tags, though I don't see the gmail cleverness of the "archive" anti-tag. Hmm, maybe I can make my default view "inbox and not tagged archive" - I'll have to try that.

Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enough

[FlyHelicopters]

To be honest, I'll admit that a few years ago, I was a frequent user of The Pirate Bay.

Now? For less than $25 a month, I have Amazon Prime Videos, Netflix, and Hulu Plus. They provide me with, more or less, all the video content I really want. (and more than I could ever watch)

There are shows and movies that come and go from these services that I'd *like* to have, but there is so much to watch, I can't be bothered to pirate them anymore.

So finally the media companies are offering a legal service that is approaching *good enough* status. It isn't perfect and yes, there are features we don't have yet that can be had with a pirate copy, but at some point it gets close enough that my time is worth more than messing with it. For the cost of 2 movie tickets a month, we have endless things to watch (and not nearly enough time to watch them all, my "to watch list keeps growing").

I currently have DirecTV in my home, cost is about $100 a month. I'm not quite ready to ditch it yet (because of my kids, Disney and Nick are popular in my house), but I see that day coming. The few things that we watch that aren't on Prime/Netflix/Hulu can be purchased by the episode most of the time, sooner or later, cable/satellite will be really pointless.

I'm sure for many, that day has already arrived. More and more each year are likely to cut that cord, just as they did with landlines. I cut my landline in 2005 and never looked back, so will it be with DirecTV at some point.

Re:Bing Crosby

[Anonymous Coward]

Get psychiatric help.

1st post!

[johnrpenner]

who needs to torrent anymore when its already all there..?

Re:1st post!

[nurb432]

1 - If you like obscure stuff, chances are its not there
2 - Many people don't like to have to be "online" just to watch or listen, or read. ( and be at the mercy of the provider and what they feel like offering this month )

Re:1st post!

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you like obscure stuff you're more likely to run into a bit torrent that has about 13% of the original content and if you're very lucky someone else might log in about once a month long enough to download an album and you'll get about another 4 percent each year. The most likely case is that no one has the entire work anymore since downloads are valued as much as newspapers are at the fish market.
 
The world's artistic works will not be restored from a bunch of ragtag torrent hoarders with desk drawers full of DVD-Rs and portable hard drives.
 
You're just another delusional downloader who wants a reason to justify their downloads. Download as much as you want, it means nothing to me but you're not the cultural trust that you think you are.

Re:1st post!

[Anonymous Coward]

you're not the cultural trust that you think you are.

Uh, I don't download myself but I do think they are, to some extent. Some people downloading/hoarding that stuff means a better chance of eventual restoration/availability than if no one does. I'm glad they do.

Not to worry.

[jeffb (2.718)]

It won't be long before our fully-purchased representatives finish overturning the last vestiges of Network Neutrality, allowing our Rightful Owners to specify and enforce the proper balance of Internet traffic.

Re:Not to worry.

[Seumas]

Access to an endless library of Netflix content for $8/mo, but bandwidth will cost you $10/gig. Enjoy!

Less People - Fewer People

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we set aside the descriptivist/prescriptivist thing long enough to just say:

YOU SOUND LIKE AN IDIOT SAYING 'LESS PEOPLE'

Really, can't the teasers at least be semi-correct?

Re:Less People - Fewer People

[databeast]

It's not like this is one of the cases where the, the wrong version flows well enough to let it slip ("12 items or less"), it even reads awkwardly. You'd think the writer would have stopped to go 'wait, that doesn't sound right' at the very least.

Throttling

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone noticing throttling for these services?

I do the speed tests and whatnot but it seems as though anything video is slower ... it's like they see a speed test and boost the bandwidth.

Netflix, Amazon, private tracker then TPB

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is accessible online - if you want my money then put your content onto a service I subscribe to. I will watch it whether or not you are paid.

Re:Netflix, Amazon, private tracker then TPB

[Anonymous Coward]

I do the same thing, although with the advent of all these different services I have noticed that I am downloading a lot less than I used too. I deleted probably 100GB's of files the other day because they where available for free online via streaming. I may regret it someday but for right now I have more room to download what isn't yet free or Netflixed. Some older TV shows that are probably not very popular so I turned to the pirates and they had it.

Well off to watch some Kolchak The Night Stalker on Netflix lol .

Worst post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Worst first post attempt ever. And by a 5-digit ID. Oh, the shame.

Enjoy it while you can

[paiute]

Dear Netflix and Youtube watcher,

Our customers have reported stuttering, loss of signal, blackouts, and insertion of pornographic images and video into their streams. We are doing everything we can to fix this problem. In the meantime you might consider upgrading to Xfinity streaming service, which we guarantee will not be hit by these glitches.

regards,

Comcast

Re:Enjoy it while you can

[timeOday]

As a long-time Comcast customer it seems to me things are going in the other direction - better! They had a 250GB cap for a while and then gave up on it. Years ago, youtube used to stall all the time and now rarely does. Then youtube was OK but then Netflix (then Prime) always paused to buffer at least a couple times during a show, whereas now it hardly ever does. I've been a VOIP user since I think 2004 (Vonage then Ooma) and, whereas it was initially fairly embarrassing to use, the spousal complaint rate has really gone down the last couple years.

I don't think Comcast can put the cat back in the bag at this point. People just expect stuff to work. And Comcast no longer dwarfs the content providers (Google, Netflix, Amazon...) They won't lie down.

Of course YMMV, I'm curious if others still have a lot of trouble streaming video?

Re:Enjoy it while you can

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you missed this little tidbit.

Re:Enjoy it while you can

[Anonymous Coward]

Free porn! Woo-hoo!

Re:Enjoy it while you can

[timeOday]

Ewww, I hope they don't bring back quotas in my area. I never actually exceeded the 250GB one, but the kids are watching more streaming video at higher quality all the time...

Re:Enjoy it while you can

[organgtool]

That's good to hear since my FIOS connection has been sucking shit for YouTube videos lately. According to independent investigations done by FIOS customers who happen to be network engineers, the problem is on Verizon's end. Some people are claiming similar issues with Netflix on FIOS. I just bought an HD TV antenna and I'm going to switch to Comcast for internet since YouTube has a chance of working on their network. Seriously Verizon, what's the point of 75 Mbps down when your network is slowing down the traffic of the most popular web site to the point of making it unusable?

Re:Enjoy it while you can

[FlyHelicopters]

I have FIOS and can confirm that sometimes YouTube sucks.

Sometimes it works great, but there are times I do end up giving up on it.

I can confirm that Netflix and Amazon Prime Video work perfectly, first time, every time, no buffering.

150 meg down, 65 meg up, and thankfully no caps. I VPN my home to my office with it (and keep the files synced between them) and I also backup online with two different services (Crashplan and Backblaze), plus use streaming services every day, I actually don't know what my bandwidth use is each month, but I'm sure it is into the terabyte range at least.

Re:Enjoy it while you can

[mcrbids]

Happy Comcast customer here.

I can log into their portal and see that I've not been within their 250 "cap" for months, yet I've received no communication from them. The instant I get a letter from them, I start with the alternative that doesn't cap. I'll go back to 5 Mbit DSL if I have to if it comes without caps.

I'd rather give my money to a company that increases profits by serving their customers.

Re:Enjoy it while you can

[drinkypoo]

As a long-time Comcast customer it seems to me things are going in the other direction - better! They had a 250GB cap for a while and then gave up on it.

They had a 90GB cap for a while, and then gave up on it! Guess I was a Comcast customer before you. This was before they had a page that would tell you when you went over the cap, and before you could get a front-line employee to tell you what the cap was. The third guy I talked to finally spilled the beans, and I finally stopped getting letters from Comcast when I stopped going over 90. This was probably a decade ago now, my god we've had cable internet a long time and yet where I live now I'm still on a shitty WISP with a 1-1.5Mbps connection.

Re:Enjoy it while you can

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon is a Tier 1 provider and is not going to pay for Google or Netflix to have higher capacity peering connections. If those providers have insufficient outbound capacity into Verizon's network, which apparently they do, those content providers need to buy more bandwidth. That's how it works.

Re:Enjoy it while you can

[organgtool]

While I realize that you're not a Verizon spokesperson, your attitude seems to mirror theirs. Either way, they spent thousands of dollars to hook up my FIOS for a couple of years of service only for me to switch to another ISP and leave their equipment to rot. As a customer, I don't care why YouTube has such poor service over FIOS - I just know that people on Comcast don't have this issue and I can resolve it by switching ISPs.

Re:Enjoy it while you can

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe not where you live, but as a former Comcast customer I can tell you I experienced issues with YouTube and Netflix. I gave CenturyLink a month trial and have had no problems with them at all.

This was just last month. Comcast could sometimes get their speed up to 35 down, but apparently not consistently enough to avoid problems.

FIOS is not available where I live, but if they were, I would have switched to them months ago.

Piracy Jab

[nurb432]

Nice that was tossed in there. Screw you.

Re:Piracy Jab

[Anonymous Coward]

In many parts of the world young students consider torrents as equality.

The sun access and knowledge access are controlled to be inversely related.

False dilemma

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, there is a third option. It's called people are using Youtube and Netflix proportionally more than bittorrent. (AKA bittorrent usage has stayed the same while other services have risen in usage--raw numbers would've been more useful than percentage)

So what this really means...

[nurb432]

Is that people are content with watching brainless cat-videos instead of learning something.

Drool... Drool... click.. Drool.

Re:So what this really means...

[PlasmaEye]

Not necessarily. The MIT Open Courseware videos are hosted through Youtube. And there are some pretty good educational videos on there like the ones put together by Vsauce, SmarterEveryDay, Veritasium, and The Slow Mo Guys. I bet the majority of views on Youtube are for cat videos, but not all the videos are utter brain candy.

Re:So what this really means...

[Seumas]

I can see you are unfamiliar with YouTube. The videos you describe sound absolutely pleasant and worthwhile, compared to the actual YouTube content.

Go watch YouTube's biggest star with the largest channel -- PewDiePie. More than 15,000,000 subscribers. Obnoxious, screeching, loud, inane Swede who calls his fans "bros" and the collective the "bro army" and pulls in something like $6,000,000 USD

This looks to be one of his most recent videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqpECat4whU

This is his *own* compilation of some of his "funniest" moments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRyPjRrjS34

Basically, his "thing" is talking like he's mentally retarded, screaming at the top of his lungs for 80% of the video, and using "rape" as a nearly constant element of "comedy" (he even wrote a song called "It's Raping Time" on one of his videos).

Then there is the girl who is a millionaire from doing "makeup tutorials" and the girls who do "my haul" videos that are ridiculously popular and earn a ton of money (these are videos where they go to the mall, do some shopping, come home, and show you what they bought).

Here's another guy who is in the top 10 or 20 of all Youtube "stars" and also earns millions of dollars for it "Smosh": http://youtu.be/yFGBjXqwzbw

Here's another dude who makes something like $5,000,000 -- and all he does is show other people's videos while commenting over them: http://youtu.be/MS8Dbvv5qss

AnnoyingOrange makes millions, too. It's an orange with a talking mouth superimposed over it. It's the most idiotic "humor" ever. It makes Larry The Cable Guy look legitimate: http://youtu.be/EDKjywzRidI

This "Tobuscus" guy makes a couple million dollars and is in the top 10-20: http://youtu.be/omGX5bleG8g

Jenna Marbles is somewhere around #3 and makes around $5,000,000: http://youtu.be/FCichOcSqz0

This Joey Graceffa guy just wanders around blabbering non-stop while recording it and does something like $200k: http://youtu.be/HH74qrfbuP0

Re:So what this really means...

[Jeremi]

Go watch YouTube's biggest star with the largest channel -- PewDiePie. More than 15,000,000 subscribers

Of course, the beauty of the Internet is that the stupidity of YouTube's top N channels doesn't effect me one bit. The content I find interesting is all there and available as well, and I never need to see (or even know about the existence of) any of the silly channels listed in the parent post.

Contrast that with television, where almost every show has to be dumbed down to appeal to a wide audience.

Re:So what this really means...

[Seumas]

True, but like other delivery methods, the ones who get the funding and assistance of youtube and YouTube "networks" are the mouth-breathing shit-shows and if the others want to make a living from their hard work, they're going to feel compelled to dumb themselves down, too.

Re:So what this really means...

[nurb432]

While true, i really doubt 90% of you-tube viewers would watch them, or understand any of it if they did accidentally click on one.

Still doesn't cut it... DRM hell, no linux, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake me when there is actually something better than wikipedia and a google search.

Also limited to particular regions of the world and those which do get it may not get it at the same time.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

and this whole time I thought that ignorant slashdot comments used up most of the traffic

codecs

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesnt netflix use inferior encoding in comparison to most recent pirated content? Although I doubt that video sizes alone would account for such a difference.

Re:codecs

[ArcadeMan]

AFAIK Netflix uses H.264 and offers three different quality settings in Canada.

Youtube has a lot of full length movies

[Trax3001BBS]

http://www.reddit.com/r/fullmoviesonyoutube/

PS3 in a drop down fashion are NetFlix, youtube, then of course Amazon instant videos and Red Box
showed up on the last update -4.5.

Flame: Know how time consuming it was to find that reddit link? It used to be a tab on my browser.

Yesterday I updated Opera 12 to version 17. I didn't want to lose the /. taking me to slashdot feature so put it off.
Opera doesn't have bookmarks anymore, how truly asinine is that? Nor can I disable flash, and much more.
So I don't use Opera after well since forever, but FireFox that auto log's me into a site (for the moment).
and off topic but I'm still hot over it.

Re:Youtube has a lot of full length movies

[Anonymous Coward]

That bookmark was worth losing. More like a list of "50 movies on DVD for $10" ultimate discount collection. These are "movies" in name only. You get what you pay for on this one.

Re:Youtube has a lot of full length movies

[DNS-and-BIND]

Yeah, Opera pretty much gave us desktop users the middle finger. They don't want us any more and don't care. They just reskinned Chrome and pushed it out the door. I'm still on 12 but that won't last forever as standards change. I don't know what I'm going to do. Chrome sucks, Firefox is a hog, IE not in this lifetime. Ugh.

Re:Youtube has a lot of full length movies

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Firefox, duh. Better of worst is still better than alternatives, as these are the only players in play.

Re:Youtube has a lot of full length movies

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though Firefox has gone a bit downhill, and even though it's developers are getting to be just as arrogant as the Chrome / Safari guys, it's still the only free (as in freedom) and customizable (as in properly) browser in town..

Re:Youtube has a lot of full length movies

[Trax3001BBS]

Yeah, Opera pretty much gave us desktop users the middle finger. They don't want us any more and don't care. They just reskinned Chrome and pushed it out the door. I'm still on 12 but that won't last forever as standards change. I don't know what I'm going to do. Chrome sucks, Firefox is a hog, IE not in this lifetime. Ugh.

I try to the get the entire downloads and not some weblink installer. Managed to have Opera 12 on hand whew!
Turned off fraud protection, stuck Opera in my routers firewall and continue on. 17 for having less is twice the size of 12.

Was just a huge coincidence that the very first thing I did was to Google something who's first hit blocked my access :}

"Because of continued abuse from users with the browser you are currently using, I'm disallowing that browser from WindowsBBS.com."

Damn lucky as well, first history link I hit looking for it :} http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsBBS.html
Figures it's a Windows MVP's site http://www.helpwithwindows.com/

I don't know what to do about a different bowser myself, IE isn't even in the running,

interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

i wonder how much traffic Hulu and Amazon Video accounts for. Hulu and Amazon Video have some TV shows that aren't available anywhere else.

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is one service I would probably end up using is Crunchyroll.

Convenience

[Anonymous Coward]

This is simple convenience.

There was a time when it was easier to download something (even through "pirate" channels) than to buy it. See: I tried to watch Game of Thrones

Now Netflix makes it extremely affordable and easy (read: very convenient) to get that content. I don't have to travel to a brick and mortar. I don't have to wait for shipping from Amazon. I don't have to download a BitTorrent client and search for active torrents. It's just there and ready to go.

You focus on what customers want and suddenly you've got more business than you can handle. Sometimes the market actually rewards the correct behavior.

Re:Convenience

[viperidaenz]

Unless you get the following message on signup.netflix.com

Sorry, Netflix is not available in your country yet.

And you local TV network cancels it's agreement with Fox halfway through the Homeland season.
There is literally no choice left but to download illegally.

Re:Convenience

[FlyHelicopters]

That is a fair point...

In your case, I think most of us understand why you'd torrent it...

Question... can you use a proxy server to access Netflix in the USA? That would be my first thought.

Re:Convenience

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of us who aren't in the USA buy a VPS from a company like BlueVM (bluevm.com) and setup a TUN/TAP VPN on it so we can stream Netflix that way. It's like $2.50 a month and it's data limit is higher than Comcasts lol.

Re:Convenience

[viperidaenz]

That would violate the Netflix terms of service.

Re:Convenience

[FlyHelicopters]

That would violate the Netflix terms of service.

Well, yes, it might, but then so does piracy. :)

I was just curious if it worked or not.

Re:Convenience

[viperidaenz]

Apparently you can use a US proxy and a credit card with a US postal address.

Content.... management!

[recharged95]

Why download a 4GB HD file and have to store, let it sit there for years when you can stream it and forget about it after 'consuming it'. As for youtube videos, no one wants to hold on to that stuff--it's short term memory videos anyway and google stores it for free....

Sure you can take that BT file and store in your cloud, but LIRC lots of cloud storage costs money (since the free account limit you at what, 5GB?).

What's killing P2P file sharing is not the offerings (though the netflix, youtube), but the content sizes and streaming. People aren't thinking about distributed backups and availability.

Re:Content.... management!

[Anonymous Coward]

What's killing P2P file sharing is not the offerings (though the netflix, youtube), but the content sizes and streaming. People aren't thinking about distributed backups and availability.

Not my fault, in the olden days of dial-up, anime fansubs had ~30 minute episodes that were good enough quality at around 50 megs a pop (realplayer format.) My mac only had 4GB total HDD so they were heavy and slow to download even on campus. It was limited in space and codecs and players for that mac were forces that made for more serious planning:
* how many episodes you would watch before DELETING older ones to prevent HDD filling
* what series to even start (mostly what your peers were watching, with the added benefit locally copying a few episodes they had not yet deleted after the long downloads)
What format to use. ASF was a pain and easily took 120MB for the same 30 minutes. It was also a great quality enhancement. Then I noticed container issues and needed players that could do permutations of xvid, h264, wmv and divx encodes depending on what the preferences of the anime delivery group was. Big pain on a mac back before flash. Even with flash streaming, local cache files on Opera could be 400MB for one ep. In any case, I miss low-quality releases. Buffering and mobile 3G is still a pain, and it seems the lower end has been forgotten. Non-fight anime has lots of stills, and as long as you can read the subtitles, I would enjoy being able to keep all the eps without being forced to wait days to download full torrents totaling in the 2GB mark for 20 episodes

Re:Content.... management!

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I sometimes forget what it's like to be poor. I download entire seasons of 600MB series and decide I hate it in the first ten minutes, and let it rot on one of my many external drives. The idea of having to delete things just blows my mind! And to think that someone would actually want a lower quality version... Is 480p not horrible enough? I won't even touch 720p unless BR rips are unavailable. Do I really need two million pixels to watch cute girls doing cute things? Well, maybe not.... But what if I get a larger monitor one day? It's better to be prepared.

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[Scowler]

Amen to that. Great service, lots of platforms, high quality, good price. Back to Bleach in a few...

incorrect assumptions

[viperidaenz]

Perhaps there were fewer world of warcraft updates pushed out?
Bittorrent isn't just used for video.

Re:incorrect assumptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Along this line of thinking, maybe the "big boys" just switched to proprietary p2p technologies that don't get lump summed in with other p2p sharing traffic.

Whatever whenever for free via BT...

[Anonymous Coward]

Has changed my sense of what movies/music/software are really intrinsically worth. So much of it is crap anyway and being able to gorge myself on it has reduced my appetite for it. There was a time I had vast collections of this stuff off BT that seemed like a treasure and then one day I just decided it was a waste of space and time and deleted it all. I never regretted it like I have never regretted throwing out my television back in the 90's. I don't use BT remotely as voraciously as I did back in the day.

Data went up...

[viperidaenz]

But did consumption go up or did video bit rate go up?
Maybe more people are now selecting "HD" streaming than they used to.

Re:Data went up...

[swillden]

But did consumption go up or did video bit rate go up? Maybe more people are now selecting "HD" streaming than they used to.

And they're probably torrenting higher video bit rates, too.

My money is on the first supposition in the summary being right: The legal services have gotten good enough, and cheap enough, that people have less incentive to reach for illegal torrents.

Re:Data went up...

[viperidaenz]

illegal video downloads used to be of fixed size. Some traction of multiple of CD or DVD media. eg: 350mb, 700mb, 1.4gb, 4.7gb,

It seems lately the sizes have been shrinking, the compression rates are getting higher. A 40 minute TV show is now less than 300mb in "SD" quality.
A year or so ago, they were 350mb
The 700mb quality has also dropped to around 560mb.

Re:Data went up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hoarders are running out of places to store their data. A big USB HD will only hold a couple of hundred Blu-Ray film rips. That's not much.

So hoarders have to pay for more hardware (not pleasant for pirating types), or download DVD rips instead. Some are even opting to become legal streamers instead - why bother pirating something that's easily available?

I would contend that the average size of torrented films hasn't changed too much in the last 5 years.

Re:Data went up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, no. I assure you, I have absolutely no shortage of storage media. This is not 1998.

Re:Data went up...

[drinkypoo]

And they're probably torrenting higher video bit rates, too.

Not just that, but Netflix is overcompressed as compared to the genuine HD video sources. Torrents have gotten bigger than Netflix streams faster, but Netflix has eclipsed torrents.

Youtube?

[rolfwind]

I find that hard to believe, half of the time, I can hardly get the vids there to play. Every year it gets worse, it's at a point making me yearn to real player.

Netflix otoh, almost never has issues.

Re:Youtube?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're counting the ads too I bet. And those always play flawlessly.

Re:Youtube?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, try this one

Re:Youtube?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your internet must be crap, then. I live in a third world country and never have any kind of problems with Youtube videos.

New video file format

[Anonymous Coward]

Could the decrease in torrent traffic be from the move to mp4?
A show is like 1/3-1/2 the size.

Re:New video file format

[Anonymous Coward]

That move is just the container format. It gives negligible savings in size. The codecs are the same.

Panem et circenses

[Mister Liberty]

Meanwhile, back in your fiber box...

Does Netflix traffic really count?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Netflix is hosted on Amazon? Thus Netflix traffic is Amazon traffic?

I would like more information, please

[PopeRatzo]

If you click a few levels through the story, you'll find that the data comes from Sandvine, whose customers are the big telecoms. Considering the battle over net neutrality, I'd say that Sandvine is not a neutral source in this discussion.

I'd like to see data from some other sources on "Netflix and Youtube are half of all Internet traffic".

Re:I would like more information, please

[Anubis IV]

Not everyone who gets paid by an industry is automatically in its pocket. In this case, they gain nothing by doctoring the report.

Sandvine's numbers are taken as fact by pretty much everyone in the know. When I was in grad school, they were the ones posting the numbers saying that torrents accounted for whatever insane percentage of Internet traffic that they once accounted for (30%+, as I recall), and practically every research paper I read quoted something Sandvine had published at some point. As I recall, the reason they're able to get such accurate numbers is because their customers are the big telecoms, which gives them the sort of access they need to make these assessments. Without that sort of access, the best you could do is get some numbers from large universities, local ISPs, and CDNs. Of those, the first two wouldn't be useful in the least for extrapolating traffic patterns to the population at large, and good luck getting these sorts of numbers from the CDNs.

Look back on Sandvine's historical data and you'll see that they haven't exactly done the entrenched telecoms any favors, since they seem to just tell it like it is, time and again, regardless of what the implications may be.

Re:I would like more information, please

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Not everyone who gets paid by an industry is automatically in its pocket.

Bullshit. It is the DEFINITION of being in its pocket.

The conflict of interest is glaring, absolutely glaring. Only an industry shill would show up here claiming otherwise.

Re:I would like more information, please

[Anubis IV]

There's a difference between "getting paid to find the results" and "getting paid to make sure the results come out a certain way". Regardless of how you define "in its pocket", that was the distinction I was going for, which I had hoped was obvious from the context. If you want to quibble, fine.

Only an industry shill would show up here claiming otherwise.

Or me, apparently. I have no relation to the industry whatsoever, but happen to be aware of Sandvine thanks to my time in grad school doing research on Internet topology. These days, I'm just doing Windows desktop app development, mostly for engineering firms in oil and gas. But hey, let's vilify the guy who says something we don't like! Ad hominem to the rescue!

Re:I would like more information, please

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it hard to believe that YouTube and Netflix are responsible for 50% of global Internet traffic, since the latter is only available in America and parts of Northern and Western Europe (UK and Scandinavia mostly). You would have to think that the rest of Europe (i.e. most of it), many populous and well-connected Asian countries, even Africa and Oceania, would have some say in the total percentage, so that those two content providers would have to be causing two-thirds or so of all Internet traffic in the other (Netflix-enabled) territories.

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[girlintraining]

I'll second that. I'm a heavy pirate, and the only stufff I get anymore is new movie releases and TV shows because for some incomprehensible reason, they are delayed reaching those services by weeks to over a year... or for things they don't carry in their catalog; For example, Babylon 5 is not available for instant viewing on Netflix.

For $10 a month, I've been fairly satisfied with the service; I wish the quality was better, but that is a limitation of crappy internet service that everyone in the country deals with.

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[amiga3D]

I mostly use piratebay for downloading shows from England. Downton Abbey for my wife is one. Frankly there is more on DirectTV than I'll ever have time to watch. I can't bother streaming anything. My wife DVR's a lot of shows and occasionally I'll sit and watch one with her, mostly cooking shows or the like. Occasionally I'll watch football or baseball. Really if it wasn't for the wife and the grandkids I wouldn't miss any of it much. Game of Thrones and Justified are the only two shows I regularly watch. I've almost entirely stopped watching the news, it all pisses me off too much so why would I watch something that's just going to aggravate me? Maybe I'm just old. Get the fuck off my lawn.

The Former

[tom229]

This is all the entertainment industry needs to do. Get behind a financial sane method of delivering media, that's more convenient than pirating, and the "war" is over. Prohibition is never the answer, yet it always seems to be the first response.

Re:The Former

[Anonymous Coward]

This is all the entertainment industry needs to do. Get behind a financial sane method of delivering media, that's more convenient than pirating, and the "war" is over. Prohibition is never the answer, yet it always seems to be the first response.

You know what the pirates of today say to the pirate lords running the show?

He started it.

Financially sane would depend on the pirates in charge not being drunk off greed. Insanity isn't far behind when corruption takes over, for there is no such thing as "enough" under a model run by greedy, corrupt pirates themselves.

Unfair to call all those businessmen pirates? Ask the artist that question. I dare you.

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[Seumas]

Exactly. I can get access to more music than I'll ever care about for $5 with RDIO, and a ridiculous amount of content for $8 with Netflix. It isn't all-encompassing, but for $13 in total, it's hard to beat. And $5 for access to all the music is a hell of a lot better than the time you'd spend acquiring music from alternative sources. Same for the television shows and movie content, for that matter. When you make enough stuff available in an easy enough and accessible enough way for cheap enough, it no longer becomes beneficial for someone to skirt methods requiring payment. Go back to charging people $30 for one movie and it all goes out the window again.

Re:Bing Crosby

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, that was pretty funny.

Torrent: Mirror everything.

[gizmo2199]

Well.. I'm pretty sure you can't mirror the BBC using Netflix.

10% for Bitorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel like I'll I've been reading for years is that Bitorrent was responsible for the majority of traffic on the Internet. What happened to those figures?

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[EdIII]

This really speaks to the Full Retard status of Big Entertainment.

The writing has been on the wall for a long damn time, they just can't see it. Not possible for them I guess.

Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime is a piracy killer. What more proof do they want? If you offer a service at a reasonable price that people actually want.... surprise surprise.. people will pay the money.

I don't pirate nearly as much these days simply because of how easy (and cost effective) the alternative is now.

The price points of these services are affordable as well. Most young people that are poor with little discretionary income can afford some bandwidth at this point and $20 for Netflix.

Perhaps that's the real battle. Big Entertainment must have constant growth and increase in prices and $100+ per month simply is not going to work. At least not in this fucking economy.

Dropping 26% Per Year Is Called Plummeting

[IHTFP]

"Meanwhile Bittorrent traffic is down slightly (7.4% from 10%) in Internet traffic compared to last year."

Nothing slight about that. If the data are accurate, that's a major change. Of course, if total Internet traffic was up 35%, Bittorrent traffic would be holding steady while everything else grew.

"Could more people be satisfied with"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?"

No... It's simply that there are more people on the Internet now who don't know how to find things via file sharing. It's a different generation.

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[FlyHelicopters]

http://www.amazon.com/Downton-Abbey-Episode-1/dp/B004KAQQ5E

Amazon Prime has all of Downtown Abbey for free...

Amazon Prime is $6.58 a month, cheaper than Netflix, plus you get the benefit of free 2 day shipping with no minimum purchase to boot.

Netflix Run ON Amazon Web Services

[Anonymous Coward]

Netflix is an AMAZON customer.

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[staalmannen]

The thing I still use torrents for is to find really old stuff (we are talking 20s-50s here, mostly "horror"). There are lots of old gems to be found on TPB, which I do not think will ever be offered by any commercial streaming service. To be fair, most of those fringe downloads are abmyssably slow. Because of this, I still think that the torrents will fill a niche also when the true pirates have disappeared. It would be great if there was a repository with 1) legal now public domain movies (the old stuff) 2) old movies that can be considered "abandonware", where the rights were tracked in one way or another. This would be a cultural contribution similar to the "scan all books in the whole world" thing Google is doing.

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[FlyHelicopters]

Babylon 5 was pulled because WB is trying to make their own go of a streaming service.

Give them a few years, it will be back when WB fails at that.

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[FlyHelicopters]

Isn't that what the Internet Archive is doing? If not, they should be.

I give Wikipedia a few bucks each year, I'd give such a service some money every year to keep all the old stuff online. It is a benefit to future generations to not lose all of that.

Personally stopped torrenting games.

[Anonymous Coward]

.. Switched to free android games..

Basic arithmetic

[J'raxis]

Meanwhile Bittorrent traffic is down slightly (7.4% from 10%) in Internet traffic compared to last year. Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?

Or, could it be that someone doesn't understand percentages? If there are three people in a room, and two are using BitTorrent, that's 67%. If a fourth person walks in, and two people are still using BitTorrent, usage isn't down at all, but the percentage shrank to 50%.

BitTorrent traffic could be shrinking, or it could be holding steady, or it could even be increasing, just not enough for its proportion of total Internet traffic to even remain constant. But you can't tell anything by just looking at percentages of the whole like that.

Re:Basic arithmetic

[Bengie]

Yes, but does it matter? Bandwidth grows exponentially every year, so percentages matter because BT keeps becoming a smaller and smaller slice of a quickly growing pie.

Re:Basic arithmetic

[J'raxis]

It matters because the conclusion that is being drawn is that BitTorrent usage is waning, a conclusion that cannot be drawn from the data, and then questions like "Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?" are being asked based on that unfounded conclusion.

Lower Bittorrent Traffic

[Anonymous Coward]

Lower bittorrent traffic because no decent TV shows were out in September, everything was wrapping up.

Re: Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Eno

[Yaztromo]

Amazon Prime only has seasons 1 through 3. Season four just completed yesterday in the UK, and probably won't be available on Amazon for some months yet. Yaz

Re: Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Eno

[FlyHelicopters]

That is true, but it will come...

They listened.

[fieldstone]

We said we wanted digital distribution. Granted, a lot of us said it by using illegal digital distribution, but now there are legal options to rent nearly any popular movie online and I think it's great. But I doubt that Bittorrent or services like it will ever go away unless obscure films become available for streaming as well. Netflix has some, but with older and weirder cinema there are a lot of holes.

The end of porn?

[hooiberg]

Does that mean that internet traffic is dominated by porn no longer? Its the end of the world as we know it! ;)

Re:The end of porn?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hoarded enough of the prons I can stay offline until they invent a new way of shagging.

75% is refreshes

[SmallFurryCreature]

Anyone want to bet what percentage of traffic is people refreshing the page because the youtube player got stuck again?

Re:75% is refreshes

[hairyfeet]

I'd rather see how much of the traffic is from the new "pirate tubes" like viooz because at least in my area more and more have simply started going to them and watching online instead of using BT.

Re:75% is refreshes

[flappinbooger]

I'd rather see how much of the traffic is from the new "pirate tubes" like viooz because at least in my area more and more have simply started going to them and watching online instead of using BT.

Yeah, no "uploading" just streaming. Get what you want, no strings attached. Video on demand is the future. Broadcast is dead.

Now quietly go away and never mention "the new pirate tubes like viooz" again. They don't exist, you hear me? There is no such thing. Ssshhh. (looks over shoulder)

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[nospam007]

"To be honest, I'll admit that a few years ago, I was a frequent user of The Pirate Bay.
Now? For less than $25 a month, I have Amazon Prime Videos, Netflix, and Hulu Plus."

It's good to be you. 95% of the planet do not have the pleasure, so we have to torrent original movies and series.

As for TFA, streaming needs more bandwidth than peer to peer, who would have thought.

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[FlyHelicopters]

Slightly more than 5% of the planet has at least one of those services, or something similar to it.

In any case, more than half the planet is more concerned with clean drinking water and electricity, so frankly the whole planet isn't the target.

As for bandwidth, actually Netflix doesn't require as much as you'd think, they have local machines they put in busy ISPs to keep the backbone as clear as possible of video traffic.

https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect

Netflix will install their server for free right in the ISP datacenter. This means that movies don't have to use the backbone, saving a ton of bandwidth.

Did someone look at the report actual report PDF

[kokoko1]

Its very interesting report, it also tells you effect on Internet traffic during...
- Royal baby born
- Google outage in August
- Release of OS X 10.9 Mavericks
and much more.
Thumbs up for Sandvine for sharing the reports.

Title misleading.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is US only data, not global. The title is misleading.

Isn't that more than 100%?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Netflix and Youtube are over 50% of traffic, how are they using more than 100% of Internet traffic? Is the Internet compressed on the fly now or something?

It's not me!

[EmagGeek]

I'm still stuck in 1999 on legacy ADSL. I'm not downloading shit.

50% of all internet traffic is run on open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Netflix runs on FreeBSD and Youtube on linux (i believe). This means that 50% of all internet traffic comes from open source operating systems.

New

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I just signed up for Netflix two days ago to watch some of these series. Watched two old Red Dwarfs instead and then The Hunger Games, which I hadn't seen. For $8 (and this is still the free month) almost have my money's worth already. They don't make you sign up and pay for the DVD service, which I will never use anyway. Good, that part is rapidly disappearing into history.

Will I want what's there in 6 months or two years? We shall see.

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[Rich0]

I'll second that. I'm a heavy pirate, and the only stufff I get anymore is new movie releases and TV shows because for some incomprehensible reason, they are delayed reaching those services by weeks to over a year... or for things they don't carry in their catalog; For example, Babylon 5 is not available for instant viewing on Netflix.

Yeah, that makes no sense at all.

Why not charge $1 to enable a movie early on your streaming account. It will be there eventually for free anyway, and you still only can watch it for as long as you subscribe. So, make it available on release day for $1 more or something like that, and then would-be pirates have to decide whether it is worth futzing with torrents and having to wait an hour or two to start watching it to save $1. Don't make it like pay-per-view where you only get it for the day or whatever.

Errors...

[deimios666]

I don't know how these sites generate that much traffic. I for one can't even use them properly.
Getting error messages like: "Sorry, Netflix is not available in your country yet." and "This video is not available in your country".
I know it's on their end since higher quality services like ThePirateBay never had any such errors, and even if there were some tehnical issues in accessing the main site, it always had an available mirror. The price was right too.
If only other sites would learn some good practices from ThePirateBay, for example: decent pricing, global release dates and quality assurance.

An order of magnitude...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if BitTorrent traffic has come down to 7.6% from 10%, it means there has been a 24% reduction. It's quite remarkable.

Did people ever want file sharing...?

[Anonymous Coward]

People never found things "useful" to download via a file sharing website, they found it unnecessarily essential. A survey once showed that most of the bittorrent traffic in the UK is TV series that are broadcast in the states and haven't been shown here. Would people have watched a streaming service with adverts, just like the telly... yes. Could they... no. Alternative... file sharing service.

In the same vein, a significant proportion of music downloaded is no longer available in the shops. Same thing applies. If people cannot get something legally then they have to resort to an illegal download vector.

People like the convenience of a nice, legal streaming or download service. People will put up with ads and things. People will pay.
Now, I don't think the current policy of pricing digital downloads at the same price as a boxed copy will work, as DRM didn't.

Sadly it will take a company taking a chance and reducing the prices (and making a killing in the process) to increase digital download uptake to make the big companies realise they got it wrong. Things are changing, slowly..... but only if someone else changes first.

completely wrong

[slashmydots]

Actually bit torrent traffic went up and Netflix traffic went up more.

Re:completely wrong

[amoeba1911]

They're talking about percentage.

That's what they said...

[Anonymous Coward]

...about Internet porn sites...

Re:Amazon Prime Video / Netflix / Hulu - Good Enou

[CCarrot]

To be honest, I'll admit that a few years ago, I was a frequent user of The Pirate Bay.

Now? For less than $25 a month, I have Amazon Prime Videos, Netflix, and Hulu Plus. They provide me with, more or less, all the video content I really want. (and more than I could ever watch)

Friggin' Yanks...some of us don't have those options, eh? Netflix is okay (I don't mind the Canadian abbreviated content) but the rest? Nope.

Even Google Music and Amazon Music still isn't available north of the 49th...so I am reluctantly forced* to use one Apple service (iTunes) for music, then re-download in mp3 so I can actually play it...

*okay, okay, I could use vpn or Tor to appear to be from the States, but I can't set up a regular credit card with my Canadian billing address to use with them...so there goes the convenience.

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had always wondered why Google doesn't default youtube to always play video in highest res (atleast for folks using broadband connection). Now this stats sheds light as to why they won't do that, atleast in near future. Surprisingly Chromecast does use highest res youtube videos (if Iam not wrong) --may be as a testbed.