BitTorrent Taking Off
Published February 12, 2004
The practical implication is that the BitTorrent system makes it easy to distribute very large files to large numbers of people while placing minimal bandwidth requirements on the original "seeder." That is because everyone who wants the file is sharing with one another, rather than downloading from a central source.
...."This past September I had, like, no money," he recalled. "I was just scraping along and doing the credit card thing again."
But unknown to Mr. Cohen, BitTorrent was serving as a job application. Out of the blue, he heard from Gabe Newell, the managing director of Valve Software, based in nearby Bellevue, Wash. Valve is developing what gaming experts anticipate will be a blockbuster video game, Half-Life 2, but it is also creating an online distribution network that it calls Steam. Because of Mr. Cohen's expertise in just that area, Valve offered him a job. He moved to Seattle and started work in October.
...."I think Bram is going to be like Shawn Fanning in terms of the impact this is going to have," said Steve Hormell, a co-founder of etree.org, a music-trading site that predates the file-sharing phenomenon, referring to the inventor of the original Napster service. "It is a bit of paradigm shift and I can't stress the community aspect of it enough. You have to give back in order to get. Going back 15 years, that's what the Internet was all about until the suits came along."
....For his part, Mr. Cohen pointed out that BitTorrent users are not anonymous and that their numeric Internet addresses are easily viewable by anyone who cares. "It amazes me that sites like Suprnova continue to stay up, because it would be so easy to sue them," he said. Using BitTorrent for illegal trading, he added, is "patently stupid because it's not anonymous, and it can't be made anonymous because it's fundamentally antithetical to the architecture." I would love to hear reports from BitTorrent users.
- BitTorrent Taking Off
- Published: February 12, 2004
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- 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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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.