P2P
BitTorrent After The Pirate Bay: Do You Still Need Trackers?
The Pirate Bay made headlines earlier this week with yet another dramatic announcement, this time that the notorious BitTorrent site’s tracker has been officially shut down. But the move won’t impact downloading, site admins explained on a blog. Trackers are no longer needed to facilitate BitTorrent transfers, the blog entry explained, because decentralized extensions of the P2P protocol are mature enough to pick up the tab. “It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date,” the blog proclaimed.
As always with announcements from the folks at The Pirate Bay, there’s a lot of self-serving smoke and mirrors, mixed with a good amount of hubris. However, the announcement does bring up an interesting question: Is BitTorrent really ready for a world without trackers? We talked to some of the major players to find out.
P2P: Villain Or Vilified? Bram Cohen’s Take
When BitTorrent co-founder Bram Cohen was introduced at NewTeeVee’s Video Rights Roundtable this morning, interviewer Schlomo Rabinowitz asked the crowd, “How many people in the audience hate this man?” — and a few people actually raised their hands.
Despite being largely vilified in the media industry for being the grandfather of P2P file-sharing, Cohen tried to deflect responsibility for any widespread piracy that has occurred using the protocol he created. But amidst a conversation between content owners and technology companies who were trying to overcome their differences to find opportunities to work together, Bram was still a polarizing figure.
“People expect me to be some kind of copyright crusader or anti-copyright crusader. On some kind of deep level, I just don’t care. To me, they’re just bits. As for what the bits are, I don’t care,” Cohen said. At that, Rabinowitz contrasted Cohen’s attitude with that of Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, who later lobbied U.S. politicians to avert a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
VODO Embraces BitTorrent to Distribute Movies, Compensate Filmmakers
UK-based P2P video platform VODO published its second feature film on dozens of file-sharing sites Thursday, hoping that worldwide exposure will bring in donations, subscriptions and traditional distribution deals. David Miller’s documentary In Guantanamo, which is the result of a press tour of the controversial detention facility, has been downloaded around 15,000 times within the first 24 hours, according toVODO founder Jamie King.
The site’s first feature, Us Now, got downloaded around 250,000 times since its release in mid-October. Part of the volume is due to VODO’s relationships with a number of well-known BitTorrrent sites, with Isohunt and The Pirate Bay currently featuring In Guantanamo on their front pages. VODO hasn’t been quite as successful in making money from these downloads, but King hopes that a combination of one-off donations and a subscription level for documentary geeks and movie buffs will help eventually make the site sustainable and provide an additional revenue stream for filmmakers.
Chinese Online Video Companies Fight for Market Share, Licenses
Chinese P2P startup Xunlei has sued its competitor Sohu for copyright infringement, according to the Shenzen Daily. Xunlei is alleging that Sohu’s search engine, Sogou, is infringing on copyrights related to Xunlei’s P2P software as well as its own search engine, Gougou.com. Sohu had previously filed its own copyright infringement lawsuits against Xunlei and other Chinese P2P vendors.
China has long been a P2P video wunderkind of sorts. Efforts to establish P2P-based consumer video platforms like Joost and Babelgum have largely failed in the U.S. and Europe, but similar offerings attract millions of users in China. However, the Chinese market is saturated with literally dozens of video vendors, and efforts to grow their business beyond the PC have stalled due to strict government licensing requirements.
Watch the Olympics Live Online…If You Paid Your Cable Bill
Tomorrow is the big launch for NBC’s 2010 Olympics coverage. With 100 days till the opening ceremonies in Vancouver, NBC Sports is flipping the switch on a new site powered by Microsoft Silverlight with help from partners such as Vertigo (which built the player) and iStreamPlanet (which is coordinating the live streaming). In addition to what should be an upgraded video experience from Beijing due to technology and infrastructure improvements alone, NBC is adding social features such as Facebook Connect integration.
However, a big question is what you’ll have to do to actually watch live video. To protect its relationships with cable companies, NBC is planning to require all would-be viewers of live long-form streams to prove that they subscribe to a multi-service operator. You’ll have to authenticate that you actually pay a monthly bill to watch TV.
NBC has been quiet about the authentication process for the games, but the issue has been lurking since word got out earlier this year. All a spokesperson for NBC Sports would tell us today is “There will be an authentication process but the details have not yet been announced.” So, consider it confirmed.
Authentication is the same technique cable companies and other operators are using for their “TV Everywhere” streaming re-run sites. And there’s a precedent; for the Beijing Olympics, NBC blocked Cablevision subscribers because their MSO didn’t agree to a special Olympics package. For Vancouver, would-be watchers may be able to authenticate in advance over the next 100 days. That way you don’t have to go the process of digging out your cable bill right when you show up to see Apolo Ohno race or some famous curler curl.
Is P2P Dead? Not So Fast
Network security vendor Arbor Networks has been drumming up publicity for its upcoming Internet Observatory Report this week. One of the widely reported tidbits is that P2P has “declined dramatically in the last two years,” and that it has been replaced by YouTube and other streaming video sites. Wired News took away from the report that “P2P is dead,” and ReadWriteWeb ran with the title: “So long, P2P, Hello Streaming Media.”
Findings like these are puzzling to anyone who’s been frequenting any of the big torrent sites lately. File sharers still seem to be as busy as ever, exchanging pretty much every movie and TV show episode you could think of. And didn’t Cisco just recently forecast that global P2P traffic will keep growing in years to come? Turns out, it’s all about how you interpret the numbers.
GoalBit: P2P Streaming Goes Open Source
Bandwidth-conscious broadcasters have a new way to distribute their live video streams. A group of Uruguay-based P2P researchers recently released the first English-language version of their open-source P2P streaming application, GoalBit. The application, which is based on a BitTorrent-like architecture, aims to compete with P2P streaming services like PPLive and PPStream by giving anyone looking to distribute their own live video programming a way to do so.
GoalBit, which is available for Windows and Linux, currently features just a handful of Uruguay’s TV networks streaming at fairly low bitrates. But the service looks promising nonetheless, and its extensive documentation could be intriguing to anyone interested in P2P streaming.
LimeWire in the Crosshairs of Anti-P2P Legislation
The House Energy & Commerce Committee is scheduled to mark up tomorrow a bill dubbed the Informed P2P User Act (H.R. 1319) that aims to prevent accidental file-sharing by mandating the display of clear warnings during the installation and usage of P2P software. Critics, however, fear that the final bill might end up going much further, regulating FTP clients, web browsers and even complete operating systems.
The bill could also have implications for anyone trying to leverage P2P for video distribution via solutions like the Octoshape Flash plug-in that was used by CNN.com to handle the Obama inauguration livestream traffic. The irony of the whole controversy is that much of the support for H.R. 1319 has been motivated by an almost religious disdain for just one file-sharing program in particular.
Skype-Joost Licensing Drama Déjà Vu for Friis & Zennström
Many people in the online video space are trying to make sense of the lawsuit Joost filed against former chairman and CEO Mike Volpi earlier today. The lawsuit has something to do with the supposed revelation of trade secrets in connection to the sale of Skype to a group led by Volpi’s new employer Index Ventures (which is also named in the suit, as it invested in Joost). But what does a failed video startup have in common with a VoIP operator? The answer comes down to one name: Joltid.
Joltid is a P2P technology provider incorporated in British Virgin Islands. It is owned by Joost and Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, and its tumultuous history makes the current fight with Volpi, Skype and eBay look like nothing special. Licensing conflicts that lead to the potential shutdown of a market leader? Been there, done that.
The Pirate Bay: Buyer Delisted, Founder Talks Strategy
The sale of The Pirate Bay hit another serious roadblock this week when shares of its prospective buyer, Global Gaming Factory X, were delisted from the Swedish stock exchange for allegedly misleading investors about the proposed transaction. AktieTorget claims that GGF misrepresented facts about its financial situation and its deals with the entertainment industry, though GGF CEO Hans Pandeya subsequently asserted to CNet that the transaction will nevertheless go through.
The entire saga over the sale is quickly becoming a kind of déjà vu. The Pirate Bay is not only known as the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker; its founders also gained notoriety for continuously announcing project after project, only to abandon most of them later on. There was the plan to buy an island, the idea to encrypt the entire Internet, the ad-supported music site Playable and the next-generation BitTorrent protocol, to name just a few. All of these non-starters did, however, help to keep The Pirate Bay in the news and accomplish things well beyond the stated aims of the The Bay’s site, as Co-founder Peter Sunde recently pointed out.
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