Hey... one word: BitTorrent

Is it good or bad?

Published on December 30, 2004 By joeKnowledge In Internet

I have read only a few articles on it, but the numbers seem astonishing. 1/3 of all internet traffic is BitTorrent users?

I am just wondering how people feel about this program. Is it the same as the other peer to peer programs using the internet to download stuff?

Do you guys ever think Cable channels or movie distibutors like NetFlix will ise something like BitTorrent to let people see movies or TV shows? What about the infristruction that was built to show all these movies through cable lines?

I think all of this new technology and the internet being used to 'push' the envolope of what music and film industries are. The internet even is effecting news because of blogging and RSS feeds to and from them.

Makes me wonder where all of this will lead. The Matrix?

Comments

CygnusXII

on Dec 30, 2004

Well I will fess up, I use it all the time to watch TV Shows, I like. I live in an area, where TV is very bad, Cable is worse, and it was a choice, sattelite or my Internet connection. I rarely watch regular TV. I get episodes of StarGate SG-1, and Some BritComs, and Nova from PBS. Many Nations are starting to roll out TV over DSL, and bundle Information Technologies, like VoIP, DSL and TV together. I think BitTorrent is a real Genie, out of the bottle, and more powerfull than any **AA group thinks, especially with the NonCentralized Trackers/ Clients coming down the road. A good site for education on every form of media tranfer in use right now is www.slyck.com [SlyckNews.com], this site gives available info that is concise, educational, and informative. It contains no links to Warez, and host no Torrents, it just give reviews, News and Information.
It covers IRC, NNTP (UseNet), P2P, BitTorrent, DC++, and various other file sharing applications in the wild.
For anyone that wants to understand what the fuss is about it is worth a read.

MarkMcQ

on Dec 30, 2004

It tends to be treated like a dirty word, for the obvious reasons, but these days Torrents are being used by legitimate companies, game companies in particular to distribute their demos. It lets the companies free up some of their bandwidth whilst still getting their products out there.

joetheblow

on Dec 31, 2004

I was looking at its possible uses and it actually has some very legitimate uses I think. It would, of course, work bad for music and hollywood... or would it? While Napster and its children did some damage, the possible bright side was the new push to get better content on-line so legit users will go to.

I think Apple did the trick (even though they don't make any profit off of selling the songs)

As for TV, News and movies, Hollywood should take the hint before it gets to popular to 'share' video on the net. A legal controlled torrent would be very low cost for Hollywood to distibute... VERY LOW cost.

I can see the headlines now...
"Netflix uses Torrent technology with MSN Encoding."

I also like the idea that I could 'technically' create my own TV show. If people like it, then it will be very available, if they don't it will be the slowest download ever...

I think I am going to look into this further... how can torrent be used legitimately.

CygnusXII

on Dec 31, 2004

Exactly...Joe
Stardock could Host Torrents of Brad's and anyone elses "how To's"
Screen captured movies on "how to's" skinstudio tutorials, Creating Widgets, you name it.
Torrents are our FRIENDS.

craeonics

on Dec 31, 2004

What I want to know is how that 1/3rd estimate came into being. We're talking peer to peer, decentralised traffic here. How and where have they been measuring that?

CygnusXII

on Dec 31, 2004

crae, here's a good start on the overall spread of BitTorrent traffic.
http://tinyurl.com/62qvt [The Register]

I don't know about the 1/3 figure but the study I refer you to says this.
"Measurements on Internet backbones indicate that BitTorrent has evolved into one of the most popular networks [8]. In fact, BitTorrent traffic made up 53 per cent of all P2P traffic in June 2004"

It makes for an interesting read, none the less.

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