Norwegian Broadcaster Evaluates BitTorrent Distribution Costs 175
FrostPaw writes "An experiment was conducted recently by Norwegian broadcasting company NRK involving the release of the series 'Nordkalotten 365' (a wildlife program) in a DRM free format using BitTorrent. One of the broadcasters has posted the approximate figures for the overall distribution costs, and discussed his reasons for doing so. Their estimated cost for using Amazon S3 to offer the files through HTTP/FTP/etc. come to approximately 41,000 NOK (about $8,000 US). However, when using the Amazon servers as the originating seed and utilizing BitTorrent, their total cost for distribution of the entire project, thanks to generous seeds, would amount to approximately 1,700 NOK. The post with the original figures is available only in Norwegian.
Government owned (Score:5, Informative)
BBC iPlayer (Score:4, Informative)
If you're not putting DRM on, then vanilla BT seems a perfect and ready-made medium. The Beeb, however, sell their programmes around the world, so won't knowingly let unencumbered versions out into the wild.
Re:Why... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well duh!! (Score:5, Informative)
You could probably write a bittorrent client as a flash applet. You press the big, shiny download button that covers half of your screen, and the flash applet connects to peers and starts to download, all with a pretty progress bar. Even my grandfather could figure that out (one of my grandmas can't even use a mouse, the other is paranoid and believes that "They" are spying on her if she use a computer, so she got rid of it).
Or, you could let people download an exe file, that when clicked will automatically launch a simple bittorrent client that automatically opens the torrent file for Nordkalotten 365 and starts to download.
They have thousands of extra dollars that they no longer need to pay Amazon, that they could now throw at the problem. I'm sure they can figure something out.
Re:Well duh!! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well duh!! (Score:4, Informative)
And for those who claim that bitlet is bad because the user is less likely to seed back as much as they take. Having someone not seed back is mostly a problem when dealing with torrents where there aren't any dedicated seeders, in which case torrents eventually will go dead.
For torrents with dedicated seeding like the one mentioned above, that simply isn't a problem. Sure, having peers provide as much as they take is advantageous, but it simply is not vital in that kind of environment. Tit for tat provides enough of an incentive for the peer to atleast provide bandwidth while downloading.
Actual Torrent Files (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Actual Torrent Files (Score:2, Informative)
Re:how nice (Score:3, Informative)
If you're already paying fully for your bandwidth the extra load on your network is already paid for and should be considered sunk cost.
In words you might understand: "The more I download/share, the cheaper my bandwidth becomes"
Re:At last! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well duh!! (Score:3, Informative)
If you allow outgoing connections, you can connect to other clients. If you can connect, you can transfer. At any speed. Transfer speeds from other clients is not a problem.
The problem you're describing is a result of the fact that if there's a seed somewhere that has a few hundred kbps of spare bandwidth (for instance, the Amazon seed), it cannot connect to you and ask you if you want some. So until you decide to randomly connect to that exact peer, you won't get any data from that exact peer. However, most clients connect to a few hundred other clients if you just give it time. If they combined can't give you more than 5 kbps, then that torrent isn't very healthy.
In short: trackers work, transfer speeds work, but it could take some time if the swarm has the wrong properties.
Re:And the actual cost? (Score:3, Informative)
ISPs set their service charges to be the amount an average user costs them in external bandwidth charges, plus their infrastructure and operating costs, plus some profit. Bittorrent will push up the external bandwidth charges and their infrastructure (they currently oversell upstream a lot more than downstream because the downstream is more heavily used).
It's a plan by the man to stick us with the costs (Score:3, Informative)
My prediction is that some clever Slashdot folks will start claiming that P2P is just an evil trick by the man to stick us with the distribution costs!
Re:Why... (Score:3, Informative)
Still, the rest are are all good arguments. There is also the matter of having dedicated seeders that keep older torrents alive. Also, if you have more dedicated seeding, the downloads will go faster for everyone. Just because you can seed bittorrent from a slow connection doesn't mean that you need to be satisfied with it.
Translation (Score:3, Informative)
Use of BitTorrent - numbers and costs
We can conclude that our experiment with BitTorrent has been a success. Most importantly, according to the comments from our users, this is something you really like. We have read more than 500 comments, and it's the first time we have seen an event with this much publicity get this much positive feedback. We have tried a lot of crazy things on the net: we've had stories on both Digg, Slashdot, BoingBoing, Reddit, Engadget and Metafilter. In these places, trolls always show up: the guys who only whine and give negative feedback. In the discussions around the fact that we as a large public broadcaster uses BitTorrent, the feedback has been almost 100% positive. Something we have never seen before in stories this large.
We can't base a new strategy for NRK on one or two comments, but when we get hundreds of them and many like this one:
In addition to this, the test has been a technical and economic success. To get this material up quickly and painlessly, we chose to use Amazon S3 both for storage and tracking. This means that we pay the bandwidth out of Amazon's S3 servers.
Some numbers
Note: Du to lacking statistics from the tracker itself and the fact that we use our S3 account for more tests, all these numbers are estimates.
Number of downloaded torrents so far: about 91000.
Due to problems with the first episode and adjustment for those who likely downloaded torrents without getting all the episodes, we subtract 11000 and end up with a number that tells us about 10000 people [likely a typo, I assume he meant 80000] downloaded all of the 8 episodes.
This means that we have distributed about 80 000 x 630 MB = 50 TB of data.
If we had paid for this through Amazon S3, it would have cost 50 000 GB * $0,16 pr GB = ca. kr 41 000.
The way it looks now, we have paid about 1700 kr for all distribution related to Nordkalotten 365. If I was a knife salesman, I'd kall this a 96% discount...
This is all good, but the most important part is that relating to the distribution itself, BitTorrent gives a fantastic user experience when it works as well as it did in this experiment. There is an automatic safety net in the fact that the load is distributed over the net. In contrast to other experiments we have done where servers have gone down, this system has handled the load and delivered the files with unusally high speed to the audience.
Once again, thank you to everyone who downloaded, shared and commented! You will see more exciting things like this in the future. Our experience of recommending Miro http://getmiro.com/ [getmiro.com] to those who don't have experience with BitTorrent or the video formats we used, was very positive.
Miro is an open and gratis solution for multiple platforms. The philosophy of the "Participatory Culture Foundation" fits well with the role of NRK as a general broadcaster in the new media world. So far, I can reveal that we have had meetings with Holmes Wilson from Miro/PCF to discuss an extended partnership. Stay tuned...