BitTorrent Taking Off
Published February 12, 2004
Profile of BitTorrent developer Bram Cohen in the NY Times:
- AFTER working for a parade of doomed dot-com startups, a young programmer named Bram Cohen finally got tired of failure.
"I decided I finally wanted to work on a project that people would actually use, would actually work and would actually be fun," he recalled.
Three years later, Mr. Cohen, 28, has emerged as the face of the next wave of Internet file sharing. If Napster started the first generation of file-sharing, and services like Kazaa represented the second, then the system developed by Mr. Cohen, known as BitTorrent, may well be leading the third. Firm numbers are difficult to come by, but it appears that the BitTorrent software has been downloaded more than 10 million times.
And just as earlier forms of file-sharing seem to be waning in popularity under legal pressure from the music industry, new technologies like BitTorrent are making it easier than ever to share and distribute the huge files used for video. One site alone, suprnova.org, routinely offers hundreds of television programs, recent movies and copyrighted software programs. The movie industry, among others, has taken notice.
....he was intrigued by a problem familiar to many Internet users and felt acutely by friends who were trading music online legally: the excruciating wait while files were being downloaded.
"Obviously their problem was not enough bandwidth to meet demand," Mr. Cohen said in an interview at a Mexican restaurant near his home in Seattle. "It seemed pretty clear to me that there is a lot of bandwidth out there, but it's not being used properly. There's all of this upload capacity that people aren't using."
....BitTorrent, however, uses what could be called a Golden Rule principle: the faster you upload, the faster you are allowed to download. BitTorrent cuts up files into many little pieces, and as soon as a user has a piece, they immediately start uploading that piece to other users. So almost all of the people who are sharing a given file are simultaneously uploading and downloading pieces of the same file (unless their downloading is complete).
- BitTorrent Taking Off
- Published: February 12, 2004
- Type:
- Section: Sci/Tech
- Filed Under: Sci/Tech: Internet, Sci/Tech: Software
- Writer: Eric Olsen
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Thanks Chris!
Very cool to see Cohen getting some ink!
I've been torrenting over at Sharingthegroove.org for nearly a year now. That site is very strict on it's non-commercial policy (read: 95% live stuff), but it's huge. There may be dozens of new concerts available for sharing in the span of a couple hours some days. It's a great avenue for tapers and collectors alike.
Bittorrent is the perfect opportunity for the video (cable, teevee, movies) business to solve their video-on-demand problem. The question is, will they act like the music business or will they see this as a solution to their problems?
Currently (just like MP3s a couple of years ago) you couldn't buy a download of a video or disc image. What a company like, say Blockbuster could do is team up with cable and DSL providers to offer fee based trackers (the servers which handle the up/downloading management of all the connected clients), you get charged for what you download, and credited for what you upload. One site I use has a points system, you get credits for what you seed, which you then spend to download.
Since the files (generally divx and mpeg4) don't offer the same bells and whistles or package as DVD, they are a great compliment.
Bittorrent solves the bandwidth problem which has made video-on-demand unscalable since it works better the more people are using it.
Offer a PVR with embedded Bittorrent, and the video business has the new VCR tape which saved their lives in the 80s. The question is, are they smart enough to take advantage of this opportunity?
The success of P2P shows there is a customer base if you are willing to sell them what they want to buy at a fair market price (which is set by what I download minus my fee for my uploaded bandwidth).
The broadcast industry gets a real metric for their audience, freedom from the insanity which is scheduling and seasons, and real syndication of their content.
And did I mention Bittorrent is just like crack?
(and speaking of increasing bandwidth, I just realized Safari has a spelling checker).
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(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/12668)
It's an excellent file sharing program, my second favorite one next to Soulseek. Obviously, a lot of people use it to trade commerically available movies and TV shows, but it's also good if you're looking for canceled television shows or obscure movies that haven't made it to DVD. Also, the fact that bittorrent sites have administrators and user feedback means its much less likely you'll download any mislabeled or corrupted files. It's not as easy to use as other file sharing programs, but it is one file sharing program that big media companies shoud be scared of.