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.
This Just In: (Score:5, Insightful)
Making other people do your work for free makes your own costs cheaper. Film at 11.
In other words, why is this news? It's something that has been obvious about BitTorrent since day 1: if you can get/make your users use their own upload bandwidth, you won't need as much of your own, and in a cost model that means your costs are lower. Did this really require a study?
Re:This Just In: (Score:5, Insightful)
Why... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Uh, yeah. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well duh!! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't forward ports to your machine then BT runs like ass - capping out at 5k/s or less. The average user doesn't know what a port *is* let alone how to forward one.
I absolutely refuse to forward ports to BT for security reasons* (and anyway which one of the 20-odd machines here would I forward to?) so even though I know what BT is I can't use it, because the trackers either refuse to connect completely or refuse to serve data.
* There are only 2 machines on this network that allow incoming ports, and those are strictly monitored and have no access to the secure LAN.
Re:This Just In: (Score:2, Insightful)
This Just In: AdBlock comes to video. (Score:0, Insightful)
The "back door"is being paid for by ads. Record all you want. The question is, can content producers survive in a world hostile to any means of them recouping their costs?
"4. If a TV station made it EASY to download their shows with full commercials they'd take over the market overnight"
Right. Much like the NYT distributing their content for the price of signing up, and see how they're taking over the market.
"Who would mess around with nzb files and all that when you could just fire up your online "Tivo" and it has already downloaded everything you're interested in."
Apple TV.
"They would still own copyright so they would only need to deal with distributed bands of unpaid volunteers redistributing their work"
Yeah right! [piratebay.com]
"It seems like the TV execs are missing a huge opportunity that they could just own without issue if they just stepped out and took advantage of it."
It must be nice living in a world free of reality.
No such thing as a free lunch (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course distributing via BitTorrent is cheaper for the originator, nobody could possibly argue this. But I'd like to see a study on the TOTAL cost to society. In other words, yes it's cheaper for the originator, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. SOMEBODY is paying for all that bandwidth/etc. If you have bandwidth limits, perhaps you are paying for them to distribute their file. If you don't (as we in the US do not) then the telecommunications company is paying. Bandwidth does not materialize out of thin air. SOMEBODY pays. Further, BitTorrent is not exactly efficient. It uses a lot more requests/connections/etc to download or distribute via BT than it does via HTTP/FTP/etc.
The offsetting factor may be the more distributed load over the system, since there's no central point, really. I'm not sure how much this really helps though.
I guess my point is, the total cost to society of BitTorrent use may very well be higher than that for distributing by older methods.
A 100% share ratio requirement is unrealistic (Score:5, Insightful)
Multicast? (Score:5, Insightful)
- Unicast
- Bittorrent
- Multicast
Multicast is so obviously the best solution all round for the, what, at least 50% of a national TV station's audience that watch predictable and consistent shows week after week. It would be pretty trivial for PCs to grab a multicast overnight.
By the way, the BBC really tried to do this right [bbc.co.uk], but ISPs were too stupid to see that it was in their best interests to cooperate. This is my reading of the evidence - I accept corrections.
Re:Well duh!! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't want to deal with port forwarding, you should either not expect your users to have full access to the internet or you should avoid using NAT in the first place.
Firewalls are no different. If you block all incoming traffic, any application that rely on incoming traffic will not function until you setup the firewall rules to work for you. And if you for some reason block outgoing traffic, you shouldn't expect applications that rely on that to function.
Besides your 5k/s or less complaint is mostly valid when you are dealing with torrents with very little dedicated seeding, in which case it is to the benefit of everyone on the torrent to not provide you with more than a token benefit which actually is equal to the total seeder bandwidth divided by the total number of peers (unless the seeder is using superseeding to weed out leechers, in which case you will get almost completly excluded). Meaning, that you should get atleast the same speed that you would have gotten if those dedicated seeds had used http for distribution instead.
Re:This Just In: (Score:2, Insightful)
Given its inefficiency, we're still seeing huge investment in P2PTV. Not only in commercial services like Joost but also public sector such as the recently announced 14m investment in "P2P Next" by the EU http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7259339.stm [bbc.co.uk]. I reckon most of it is fuelled by the perceived cost savings for the broadcaster. However, ISPs are already complaining about the shift in costs, so how long before this investment backfires and the ISPs do something to readdress the balance?
Re:No such thing as a free lunch (Score:3, Insightful)
If everyone does the same, the distributor has to increase the amount he spends on bandwidth until the distribution basically becomes like http/ftp but with a minor overhead. And in that case it would of course be better to use http/ftp instead to avoid that overhead.
The only way to let this play out however is to let each peer decide for himself if spending their upload is worth it. This is one of the basic rules of modern economy. The overall pattern of all participating individuals is efficent.
If telecommunication companies in the US cap bandwidth, fewer individuals will share and the distributor will have to spend more on providing dedicated seeds to keep up the same download speeds, making bittorrent less profitable than the dedicated http/ftp downloads.
The point is that we have already have lots of bandwidth that we use just to get things from servers to clients. This however means that the servers are working at full capacity all the time, while the clients are mostly idleing (both bandwidth and processor). What p2p does is use those idle clients to perform real work, thereby offloading the servers, decreasing the amount needed.
Re:At last! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This Just In: AdBlock comes to video. (Score:3, Insightful)
That price was too high, though. They, unlike dozens upon dozens of other newspapers, who all get their page one stories from the same two sources (Reuters & AP), they required users to give up information about themselves. And they didn't ask for much. At least, not much less than a bank would ask for when taking out a loan of several hundred thousand dollars.
So let's see here: Enough information for identity theft in exchange for "access" to the same stories as everyone else, plus the made up stories, plus the horribly slanted editorial pages.
Re:This Just In: (Score:3, Insightful)
However, your ISP must make a profit or go bankrupt. If the ISP's cost grows, and he doesn't want to go bankrupt (which doesn't serve anyone), then he has the choices: Stop you from using as much bandwidth, get rid of you as a customer, charge more for your account, or charge more for every account. In the end, you pay.
However, this just SHIFTS costs... (Score:3, Insightful)
For a one-off experiment like this, it wasn't a problem. But if you are an ISP dealing with a company like Vuse, who's businsess model is shifting terabytes in this way, it will be a problems.
Not quite (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they didn't. P2P pushes some of the distribution cost from the originator into the network, and I don't see that this is accounted for at all. If things like Oprah-Skype [disruptivetelephony.com] at 242 Gbps become common, it will not be possible to ignore the distributed network costs.
Re:This Just In: (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you decide what your house is worth when you sell it? Simple - you offer a price and haggle until it is worked out. Happens every day in ad agencies worldwide...
Re:This Just In: (Score:2, Insightful)
I recently looked at an online movie service and it required me to use THEIR media play yet ANOTHER bit of software to install and the files were twice the size that I find on ThePirateBay.
I came to the conclusion that the product is all round better from ThePirateBay than what legal download services will offer me even if ThePirateBay charged the same price per movie I would still use them because its a better service.
~Dan