BitTorrent has been getting somewhat of a bad rap. Although BitTorrent itself sells copyrighted content over its P2P file sharing protocol, the service has become better known for less than legal downloads from sites like “The Pirate Bay”. It has been particularly popular for pirating because it easily distributes the cost of transmitting files across the network of users downloading the file.
Now BitTorrent is taking another try at legal torrenting by applying the power of peering to content its partners want to be shared, free files and streaming video. The new service, BitTorrent DNA (Delivery Network Accelerator), uses torrents to assist in sharing these files with their users. It effectively creates a virtual network of viewers’ computers that will share amongst themselves to speed up downloads for popular files from your servers.
The peering arrangement sounds a lot like what BitTorrent currently does, share large files amongst many user. DNA’s big difference, however, is that it does this more transparently. Viewers don’t need to search for tracking files and deal with a torrent download manager, but instead simply install a new BitTorrent client (around 330 K) that handles everything when they come to a DNA enabled site. For example, when you’re on a site and halfway through watching a movie or downloading a file, DNA shares these files behind the scenes with other users that need it too. If you’re concerned about sharing being too much of a drag on your bandwidth, you can go into your control panel and shut off the “download acceleration”.
The main selling point is that BitTorrent should reduce your bandwidth costs, meaning publishers can hold on to more of their ad revenue. The savings is expected to be pretty significant, with BitTorrent saying their customers can shift as much as 80% of their content delivery to the P2P network. Brightcove, one of their launch partners, will be using the peering technology to serve their high bandwidth video content for a new product, “Brightcove Show“.
By teaming up with BitTorrent, Brightcove hopes to take on Joost by allowing its network of Web video publishers to stream broadcast-quality, full-screen videos (possibly even up to HD-quality) without the need for a separate, walled-garden application. The videos will just stream directly from the Web, with bits being pulled from other people’s computers who have the BitTorrent DNA client and have watched a particular video, combined with bits delivered from the Limelight content-delivery network when there aren’t enough BitTorrent peers available to do the job.
It may no longer be a dirty word, but despite its popularity, is has the same techie feel as something like RSS. The general public still seems to have no idea what it is (at least in my experience).
Sounds interesting but I am sure Pando won’t let them take over this market.
Pando has the fantastic ability to appeal to non-techies. All of the average computer users I have shown Pando too have adopted it and use it regularly.
None of those same people can use the Bittorrent client for sending files.
Um…how is this different from webseeding? A private network between just the people downloading a certain file?
Well, I believe the current “torrenting” practice will not stop. If bittorrent consider this as expansion, they should make child company. Using the same name scared them with streaming become copying and make it available in torrent network straightway.
There is no doubt : despite the increasing capacity of IP backbones, the emergence of HD movies and videos, added to the increasing demand for more and more “niche audience” multimedia contents will make P2P technologies the best solution to efficiently deliver huge video files to consumers and to promote & sell “long tail” multimedia contents, with very low distribution cost fot content producers.
Empowering the IP network infrastructure is a first step, then we have to make P2P technologies usable by non-techies. Some companies, like AllPeers, are working on it, by embedding a P2P client in the browser. It is a good idea for making the general public to use P2P networks transparently.
And at the end, having set up efficient P2P infratstructures and useful embedded P2P clients, we have to find the answer to this question :
“How to allow Internet consumers to easily find interesting contents, to freely discover a movie with a preview, without any piracy risk for the right holder?”
DRM technologies are a huge mistake : they lock the content on a device, whereas the Internet is a way to share and recommend. Why not let the ocnsumer be a part of the distribution channel ?
Some solutions are emerging to replace DRM by “DUM” : “Digital Usage Management” : files can be freely copied, shared, redistributed among users, but their use remains under control…
I don’t see anything wrong with torrents.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
To most of the above – The whole DNA effort is a push to making the technology more accessible, by making it seamless to the user while they’re on the site.
It’s also come with a change in language. DNA is a “video accelerator” not a downloading client.
“Although BitTorrent itself sells copyrighted content over its P2P file sharing protocol, the service has become better known for less than legal downloads from sites like ‘The Pirate Bay’.”
That should read
“Although THE BitTorrent COMPANY itself sells copyrighted content over its P2P file sharing protocol “BITTORRENT”, the BITTORRENT NAME has become better known for less than legal downloads from sites like ‘The Pirate Bay’.”
protocol != service != company
BitTorrent has been getting somewhat of a bad wrap.
As you are most definitely aware, spell-checkers do not have the capability as of yet to prevent improper word usage such as in the case that call for the word ‘rap’ as opposed to ‘wrap’.
This DNA thing is horrible – I never asked for it, but I installed the BitTorrent client. Then today I realized that 80% of the network connections my computer tries to make are failing because no sockets are available. Running ‘netstat’ reveals there is some process called dna.exe that is making HUNDREDS of connections to computers all over the world, presumably for discovering peers, without my knowing or ever consenting to this. Given that I installed the BitTorrent client, and explicitly shut it down when not in use, I find it a bit disconcerting that it decided to run dna.exe on startup without ever having asked my permission to do so.
http://www.podmailing.com is also for non-techies, and to my knowledge it is the only BitTorrent client backed by a free service for re-seeding your files.
It’s as easy to use as e-mail: when you send a large file (up to several gigabytes), it is immediately uploaded to our servers which ensure that the file can be efficiently downloaded thereafter.
Files can then be downloaded with Podmailing or with any BitTorrent client (we’ve even integrated the BitLet applet enabling the download within your browser
.
This is exactly what net neutrality is about. This is stealing bandwidth. You’re supposed to pay to deliver content to customers not force them to do it for you.
Didn’t Chaincast Networks (now StreamAudio) patent the same idea in 2001? Seems like a bit of a recycled idea…
http://www.wipo...p?wo=2001065767
podmailing is a P2P torrent where you send large files that are too big for email and other means. podmailing,com
a friend of mine made a video and sent it to me via podmail. Each person must have the software installed, its free. A sent file can be retrieved later if you’re not online.
check it out.