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.
Well duh!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously yer average slashweenie has heard of BitTorrent, and even I would probably mange to be able to find it and install it and make it work if I really wanted to
And how many people's grandmas:
(1) can cope perfectly well with watching a telly programme on a web page in the normal way
(2) wouldn't have the remotest clue what you were on about if you started wittering about BitTorrent?
how nice (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And the actual cost? (Score:3, Interesting)
I would have liked to see an analysis of the actual total distribution cost - not the cost to the originator, but the total.
In the UK, cost of internet data consists of two parts: The cost of getting the data to your ISP, and the cost of getting the data from the ISP to your home, usually using bandwidth bought at wholesale prices from BT (British Telecom). The cost for the ISP to send data to your home is around £0.60 per Gigabyte, But the cost to get data from a huge source to the ISP is much lower. For example, getting a movie from the BBC server to your ISP has negligible cost, compared to the cost of getting the same movie from the ISP to your home. A Bittorrent would obviously send data from many, many homes to ISPs, and then from the ISPs to different homes. In other words, the data goes through the expensive route twice instead of once. I would think that the actual cost is actually almost twice as high using Bittorrent.
An interesting question is: Who pays for it? In the end, your ISP pays the cost. The ISP will of course calculate your monthly payments so that they will come out ahead, and if you use torrents a lot they might convince you to get a more expensive package with more bandwidth. So in the end you will end up paying the cost.
Re:This Just In: (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Right now networks can only own one station per market. With HD they can in theory broadcast multiple streams on it, but only a few. With online distribution they could put out as much content as they would like.
2. Right now anybody can record and redistribute the off-the-air content. So, DRM is trying to lock up the front door when the back door is already wide open.
3. Right now due to inefficient distribution schemes shows only run in a local market, creating a huge demand for online content. Typically this content lacks commercials, and is ignored when calculating ratings even if it did.
4. If a TV station made it EASY to download their shows with full commercials they'd take over the market overnight. The big networks could collaborate to make it easy to watch their shows just like watching TV. 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. The polished experience would give them 99% of the market all the time.
5. Sure, in theory somebody could find some way to redistribute their content and strip out all the commercials, but the scale of this task except for a few shows would be hard to match with the level of polish that the networks could deliver. They would still own copyright so they would only need to deal with distributed bands of unpaid volunteers redistributing their work - if anybody tried to organize they could be dealt with in court. The court cases would be stronger since the networks could convine local governments that they are actually genuinely trying to get their content to everyone (right now some countries turn a blind eye to copyright violation since it enables their consumers to get access to TV they wouldn't ever see otherwise).
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.
Re:This Just In: (Score:3, Interesting)
An evaluation of the true costs would be interesting, but probably nearly impossible to calculate as it's too distributed.
Re:This Just In: (Score:5, Interesting)
http://torrentfreak.com/university-uses-utorrent-080306 [torrentfreak.com]Dutch University Uses BitTorrent to Update Workstations
The worst case scenario is when every single users deems uploading to be too costly for their own good and therefore caps it to nothing. In that specific case, bittorrent basically have the same efficency as http or ftp, needing the same amount of dedicated servers and bandwidth. There would be a slight efficency loss due to protocol overhead, but that is minor when dealing with large files.
In most cases however, the upload bandwidth of a peer will be less expensive than that of a dedicated seeder for the simple fact that the peer is idle otherwise, while the dedicated seeder is working at full capacity.
Also, spreading out the distribution costs on the users lessens/removes the need to actually have to charge the users for that same distribution. Even if the users have to pay some/most of that money to the ISP instead, the simple fact is that removing the need for micro transactions is a huge benefit in itself.
Re:This Just In: AdBlock comes to video. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, and the online content would be as well. They're already surviving in the world you describe - you can get most shows today ad-free, and yet almost nobody does. Oh sure, the average slashdotter might, but I'm talking about the other 99.999% of folks who have money to spend on advertised products.
Right. Much like the NYT distributing their content for the price of signing up, and see how they're taking over the market.
Uh, the online news market is dominated by probably 3-4 companies (I'm talking about the content and the ads - not the portal people visit through). To the extent that they're losing out it is to companies like google who are doing exactly what I'm suggesting the TV networks should do. All of them were traditional news networks before the internet came along. I don't see your point. No one network would beat out all its peers by doing online - but they could make a lot more money this way.
Apple TV.
Uh, what will Apple TV do? Make it easy for people to download TV shows with random filenames posted to random distribution networks by random people? Easier than obtaining the TV from a couple of TV networks distributing shows via standardized protocols over big pipes with lots of infrastructure behind them? I'm sure the networks would give Apple a cut for every referral - the button to watch Battlestar Galactica from the official sources will be bold and on page 1, and the option to configure browsing through random files on TPB will be buried on configuration page 12...
Yeah right! (linked to TPB)
Ok, go ahead and schedule 10 TV shows to auto-download all episodes from TPB so that your 80-year-old grandmother can just click on the show they want and watch it on their TV using a remote control (not a keyboard). Oh wait - the 10 shows don't have any metadata, and the filenames aren't consistent, and a few are posts by guys who didn't bother to seed.
Sure, TPB works, but not well. And it won't have the Gardening special that aired last night or anything not of interest to geeks (who make up all of 1% of the population).
And TPB exists now, and for whatever reason 99% of everybody doesn't use it. Maybe everybody you know does, but most people don't. So this isn't a new threat. And going online will probably actually help to combat it, as opposed to networks sticking their heads in the sand.
Re:This Just In: (Score:3, Interesting)
People do seem to throw around words like "efficient" without saying how they're actually measuring it.
One meaning of "efficient" could be the amount of bandwidth, in which case you want to measure the average number of hops needed for end users to get the content. I just used traceroute to tell me the number of hops from cbs.com and nbc.com, and they came out to 13 and 12 respectively. So the total byte count when I get data from them should be multiplied by about 12 to get the total bandwidth used. Bittorrent cuts this total down significantly by redirecting my download to other, hopefully closer sites. I've never seen any data on the actual bandwidth saving that results. I wonder if anyone has credible statistics?
Another meaning of "efficient" is the delay at the end user's machine before content can be seen. A major problem with mass-market sites is saturation due to too many downloads (the "slashdot effect", if you like). If you're the only one downloading a show from a server, you might get it quickly, but if 10 million people are trying to get it at the same time, even the best server farms today will still produce serious delays. This is the main problem that bittorrent was designed to solve (or at least alleviate). I've also never seen any credible data on this topic. Anyone have a good estimate of how good bittorrent really is at speeding up delivery of a popular file?
Bittorrent may help with both of these kinds of efficiency, but there's also an argument that efficiency really isn't the issue. From a content producer's viewpoint, the major problem is the cost of distribution. For the current TV system, this is a huge operation, with crowds of people working to maintain the distribution system. Keeping this running is a major cost for TV producers, as they ultimately need to deal with every little local cable/broadcast company in the world. You could call this an "efficiency" problem, where what you're measuring us human labor. An advantage of the Internet is that it's a global distributed distribution system, and all the costs are reduced to a single connection fee plus your local people to maintain the servers. You don't have to negotiate with distributors like cable companies; you just talk to your ISP.
The main barrier to a total move to the Internet is that the Internet wasn't designed to efficiently (whatever that means) distribute a single file to 10 million people simultaneously. That's what bittorrent and the other P2P packages are designed to do. If we can get top management over their natural fear of anything new, and look at P2P as a cost-saving distribution technology, they'll probably jump onto it. What we're seeing with this story is one small content producer finally realizing this, and looking at it from a sensible business viewpoint.
In another few decades, the big TV producers might even come to their senses and take a similar approach. Of course, for it to work, it'll take widespread enforcement of "net neutrality", under whatever name the marketers have renamed it by then. If an ISP can block your content until you pay their extra fee, you're right back with the current problem of needing to maintain a huge system to oversee your dealings with every ISP in the world. But maybe once the big guys realize this, they might even jump on the "net neutrality" bandwagon, and demand a system in which they need only pay a single fee to a single ISP to access the Internet.
It's gonna take years to work it all out. Stay tuned
Re:This Just In: (Score:2, Interesting)
It would only take one diehard fan record the time signatures for an entire series.. And only one good hacker to open up fastforward across an entire DRM scheme.
All that being said, I also hope the networks start online distribution. =)
Re:This Just In: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because media and corporate people are morons? I've wondered for nearly a decade why even regular stream is considered a poor cousin and a toy. If I'm listening to a radio station in Paris I might not understand every word, but I'll pick out "Coca-Cola". There should be some fund of Coca-Cola International that the station is collecting from to support that stream. Same for Podcasts. Just leave the commercials in and distribute them for free _as_long_as_ the sponsors are paying for that extra channel.
True, it isn't perfect. A BBQ rib joint advertising in Paris probably won't get my business. And there is the general question of "listenership" -- but how precisely has that ever been estimated?
Torrents just ramp the stakes up exponentially. What's the value of having your show (preferably with commercials if we are talking value$) available on demand from the cloud "forever"? It's actually rather amusing if you think about it. Like trying to put a value on an illegal upload and then trying to collect that amount from the corporation you sold the advertising to. Is that something-less-than-eternal commercial something-less-than-infinitely valuable? If there are a million something-less-than-eternal coca-cola commercials available on demand, how much should an advertising agency be paid to produce the million-and-one commercial? Insider trendiness manipulation could become as profitable as stock manipulation.
Seems to me the biggest practical hurdle is still, ironically, distribution -- at least as a generational gap. Not all car systems handle mp3, not all people over 40 routinely do a dump to their portable player for the week. Who will create the first programmable podcast retrieval and player for the car -- Sweet Jesus willing only programmable when the car is in park?
Re:A 100% share ratio requirement is unrealistic (Score:-1, Interesting)
Outside of the fact that it led to precisely the problem you describe - people having to leave their torrents running for weeks in the hope a new downloader would show up and give them the ratio boost they needed to be able to grab that other new torrent they wanted -, and outside of the general idiocy of *requiring* people to seed so they could download (as if downloading somehow hurts the network! in reality, it's the opposite: the more downloaders, the more seeds there'll be eventually, not to mention everyone'll be happier), I never understood how the admin(s) could be so thick as to not get the fact that it was mathematically IMPOSSIBLE for the average (mean) ratio across the site to be precisely 1.
The above is one reason why I chuckled when I heard that OiNK got busted - I really hated the elitism displayed there. And on top of that, while the site had some interesting stuff, sure, it was nowhere near as much as it was made out to have.