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Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

I just installed Diablo III, most of which was delivered to me via BitTorrent. It worked pretty great.

In theory, Apple et al could also use BT to distribute movies, yes? Have iTunes run a modified BT client that only connects to other approved clients?

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I've often thought that Podcasts should be distributed over BitTorrent. Every so often Ira Glass comes on the This American Life podcast and mentions that it costs over $100K a year (or whatever) for just the bandwidth of hosting the podcast.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't give directly to support your favorite public radio shows and/or your local public radio station, naturally.

I've heard him make the same statement and had the same thought. Is there any downside for them to add a BitTorrent option? Maybe it's just that they can't track the number of downloads?

If that's all, it seems like a small price for drastically reduced hosting costs. And if there isn't already, there should be a protocol for "distribute via BitTorrent but ping the original seeder to let them know".

There are two problems with it:

First you have to create the possibility for the people to download your podcast as a torrent. This sounds easy but is additional work. A new project that wants to tackle this is http://bitlove.org/ where podcasters just have to add their regular feed and the site will create a bittorrent feed and seed the torrents (extensive German descrpition: http://metaebene.me/2012/05/06/bitlove/)

The other problem is that users need to be able to easily download the torrent feeds. Some bittorrent clients support feeds, but right now only one podcast client understands bittorrent: http://http://www.getmiro.com/

If Apple were to take a leadership role here, that would help. If iTunes on desktop and mobile supported torrent downloads, the iTunes podcast directory would seed or link to seeds, and if there was some sort of protocol for pinging a centralized place to let content providers know how many times something was downloaded.

People have been putting torrent links in their RSS for years.

Yes, but it isn't particularly widespread, I checked the RSS for a few of my favorite podcasts and they don't have them. I also checked to see if any of my favorite podcast players support torrent downloads and they don't appear to.

I asked some folks at NPR about this a few years back.

I can't seem to find the exact message they sent me, but I believe the issue is that their licensing of content (mostly the music) on the show has specific rules about how that content is distributed (or not distributed).

Miro promotes and supports torrent based (video) podcasts. http://getmiro.com

Couldn't he put the file in Dropbox or Google docs get free downloads?

Both sites have a Terms of Service that prevent the misuse of their resources. If you've ever clicked on a popular link to a file on Dropbox's servers, you may find a page that tells you "This file has reached its daily limit of downloads" or something along those means. Google likely has something similar with Google Drive.

If there were a TV network sponsored torrent site with a monthly subscription, and no DRM, I would throw my money at them so fast. I doubt this will happen, though.

Well. NRK (Norwegian national tv broadcast service) puts a lot of its content online. Since they don't have the bandwidth to handle the large spikes in activity, they publish a lot of this content as torrents.

http://video.nrkbeta.no/torrents/

DRM or not, this seems like a great way to distribute content.

BitTorrent is a great technical advancement. It's a fantastic, brilliant, genius new invention that makes it much much easier to share data. It, paradoxically, gets faster the more people who want to download! It's a brilliant technical solution to a big, pressing, expensive problem.

I am annoyed when such a marvelous technical solution is seen as nothing more than a shady, illegal software. ☹

BitTorrent is like a lock pick set. There are valid uses such as if you've locked yourself out of your house, but if the majority of people use a lock pick set to unlock the back door to a movie theater and sneak in to watch movies without paying no doubt it would be perceived similarly.

Bad analogies are like Vietnam.

That's not entirely valid.

There is _one_ legitimate use for a lock pick set: to unlock something you own that you've accidentally locked yourself out of. There are literally billions of uses for BT: every large public (legal) file that's currently distributed via centralized server.

There is one legitimate use for BitTorrent: to efficiently transfer data that you have permission to access.

Some people use lock picks to unlock doors that they don't have permission to much in the same way that some people use BitTorrent to transfer data they don't have permission to.

Fair enough. But even if I accept your definition of a "use," there are millions of files you could legitimately download with BT. There are a handful of locks you could legitimately open with a lockpick.

Are you not familiar with Locksport?

No and neither is anyone else, statistically speaking.

(Personally I know exactly what you're talking about, but trying to hang your case on an obscure sport isn't doing it any favors. The lockpick analogy is bad and a car analogy would serve you much better.)

Not my analogy, and I agree it was terrible.

I would say it's like a car, it helps people get to places faster but every time there is a bank robbery the thieves get away in a car

BitTorrent is a pawn shop that sometimes sells guns to criminals. A lock pick set is more like a keygen, to go with the gun.

(You know, as long as we're speaking in analogies)

mostly sells guns - I suspect the ratio of dodgy/legit is worse for bittorrent that the average pawn shopp

It is a great way to distribute content. It more or less scales the delivery network in step with the number of content consumers.

There's also an interesting economic to torrents...the crappier the content, the fewer people seed. The fewer people that seed, the harder it is to get and the longer it takes. On the flip side, really great content gets seeded like crazy, and everyone can enjoy it quickly.

Although I agree with your post in general terms, I want to highlight is not great content gets seeded, its popular content. There is a diference. Specially since great old content decreases in popularity.

It's both. Great content and popular content both get seeded quite a bit, even as they age.

I've heard that popular content gets lots of leaches, but they don't seed for long. They delete the file once they've watched it, because it just wasn't that good.

Good content gets a lot of seeders, because they keep it for longer.

I think BBC iPlayer uses torrents internally to deliver its programmes. There's DRM, but it's not very restrictive. I throw my money at them once a year.

Well twice-ish as you pay them once via the Exchequer and once via TV Licensing.

How is their DRM "not very restrictive" unless you mean you can download DRM free if you can afford an iPhone (I think that's still true?). You can watch shows for 1 week before they're locked, can't you.

But yes last time I used it they installed a hidden application called Kontiki that there's practically no control over that leeches bandwidth without asking.

Yes -- and no. You have to remember that outside of a few countries, unlimited internet isn't ubiquitous. Admittedly, NZ is basically a worst-case scenario (we're connected to the rest of the world by a single pipe, access to which is - was - priced expensively), and we've recently seen an explosion of data caps ($130 for 550GiB from one provider, now), but that's only a very recent development. Some ISPs charge up to $2 a GiB - still.

So, using BT and seeding becomes a less valid option. Still, I'll happily admit that things are changing, and if NZ is a yardstick of the bad, then BT as a distribution mechanism (backed by, say, Akamai or other CDNs) for legal content could definitely take off.

Woulden't bittorrent be beneficial in NZ for popular torrents since not everybody needs to download the entire content through the Southern Cross Cable but instead could download some from local NZ peers?

In a perfect world: yes. In reality: your uploads count towards your data cap, and national traffic is no longer free (it used to be). When your data cap is expensive/small, seeding can cost you a significant amount of money.

Then there would have to be some feature that filtered non-NZ-peers. Would be great, but I don't think any bittorrent implementation supports this (yet).

A firewall rule on your router should work?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Peer_Discovery

That's local as in Local Area Network as in it discovers other peers inside your house. To discover other peers in the same ISP you'll need to wait a few more years for ALTO.

Local Peer Discovery is for LANs

> outside of a few countries, unlimited internet isn't ubiquitous

Reference?

There are some somewhat big, and most importantly legal, actors that do this already for music :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Technical_information

Did you check the actual numbers on that? I was impressed with the speeds I was getting, and figured it must be because they were using a P2P mechanism, but when I looked at the download statistics (in the downloader, there's an option to show network information), and was very surprised that it was almost entirely directly downloaded. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something on the order of 1-2% of the total download.

That said, as someone else alluded to, maintaining that CDN with that bandwidth is probably crushingly expensive, and is something only Blizzard and a few others could pull off.

Blizzard is a known BitTorrent user.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28protocol%29#Softw...

Does valve publish it's bittorrent support anywhere?

besides hiring the guy? i mean, one would think responsible news outlets (are there any?) would request valves comment everytime they publish the RIAA side, since valve profits buckets from it.

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