The outspoken software entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team offered his thoughts on the emerging power of BitTorrent file-sharing technology.In a post on his blog yesterday, "blog maverick" Mark Cuban offered his thoughts on emerging new P2P technologies, and BitTorrent in particular. The often outspoken and frequently vocal software and basketball "maverick" felt that it was time to take stock of P2P and file-sharing considering all the press it's been getting as of late. He noted Verisign, Adobe, The Venice Project, and BitTorrent Inc. as all being among a new wave of P2P innovation sweeping the Net. It should be added however, that Google has just announced a deal with the Chinese P2P company Xunlei, and that this is in addition to new P2P hardware like the new BitTorrent-Optimized Microprocessor, as well as Netgear's new BitTorrent focused router. BitTorrent holds particular promise for the future of content distribution as it uses an individual's bandwidth to assist in file-distribution and transfer versus solely consuming the resources of the distributor. In addition, it also speeds up the processes tremendously by the way in which data is broken down and transferred, eventually being reassembled into an original copy on a users PC.
The reason there has been excitement about P2P technologies built around BitTorrent type technology is simple. It saves bandwidth on file distribution and it creates the opportunity to speed the delivery of files, large or small. If it were able to live up to the hype, the notion is that how multimedia is distributed on the net, and its economics would change.From a business perspective, the important element is that if X number of people request a 1gbs file, rather than a host computer having to deliver files consuming Xgbs, the file is tracked among the peers and delivered using their bandwidth and resources , relieving the host of the bandwidth cost and obligation and hopefully speeding the delivery of the contentBitTorrent does indeed have the potential to redo the map of content distribution as we know it. It has already done this, for better or worse, on a large scale with pirated material and content but, it has yet to crack the mainstream. It will be nice when there's a day that all content and material can be distributed quickly, efficiently, and without fear of legal repercussions using the BitTorrent's protocol. Yet, Cuban raises a good point in that if a user is expected to then begin paying for content where is the incentive for him to give up his bandwidth without compensation? As it stands today, notions of fairness aside, a user shares, or uploads data, to others so that he may get content in return. In fact, setting a proper upload speed is essential to getting a decent download speed. But, if a user is suddenly expected to pay in order to download material, where is his incentive to use his upload bandwidth to capacity? Without this incentive it undermines the whole BitTorrent swarm unless the content distributors make more downloading capacity available but, this also undoes the whole methodology of BitTorrent's economy of scale. Cuban writes: The P2P model of seeding is a HUGE problem for those using wireless broadband with bandwidth constraints or per bit or per minute costs. People are going to wake up and find that they owe Verizon, Sprint, whoever a lot more than they ever thought possible because they installed a client on their Laptops. That could lead to these networks blocking the protocol.There is a misconception that there is bandwidth savings for the end user. If you want to download a 1gb size file, 1gb of data will be delivered to your PC. There is no savings of bandwidth on the client side. In fact, the client is charged a bandwidth premium because after they have received the entire file, they are asked to participate in the peering by delivering parts of the file to other users.Long story short, the consumer gets no real tangible benefit from this method of distribution because the incentive model has been completely corrupted. If a person is expected to pay a fee to obtain a file then why should he also have to pay for its distribution to himself as well as to others? Is this the new "shipping and handling fee" of the future?
RELATED NEWS AND "HOW TO" GUIDES:Netgear partners with BitTorrent Inc.Could BitTorrent Inc. be the new model for file-sharing legitimacy ...New Sony TVs will stream video from the internetBitTorrent keeps going legit'; Azureus to offer BBC shows ...µTorrent sells out, gets bought by BitTorrent IncBitTorrent torrent sites & search enginesAzureus - A Beginner's Guide to BitTorrent DownloadinguTorrent - A Beginner's guide to BitTorrent downloadingWatch The Simpsons, The Office, Jackass, South Park, Lost, X-Men, and More On-Demand For FreeTVU, Free P2P Cable TVTons of Your Favorite Movies On-Demand for FREE!SOULXTC: "walkin' the streets of P2P" |
 
|
members that voted for this story
|
As Cuban notes: 
