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50 Comments
- WarpFox, on 10/12/2007, -1/+44By comparison to other programs, yes, BT is tremendously difficult. Torrents and trackers are incomprehensible to people who run in 640x480 and need help "downloading to disc" their digital camera photos.
You know exactly who i'm talking about. - 1jaxstate1, on 10/12/2007, -2/+39I guess you have never had to do any port forwarding.
- SeaBass22, on 10/12/2007, -4/+40Here are 5 reasons
1. btjunkie
2. pirate bay
3. torrentspy
4. isohunt
5. mininova - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+29Over the years I've had to help countless people to set up a torrent client. . . . even when it's set up right, they still don't know why they did what they did.
It's not quite two clicks - kittynipples, on 10/12/2007, -1/+22I'm especially fond of the idea of paying them to *rent* movies, while also providing my bandwidth to support their distribution model. Might as well just use NetFlix, at least I'm guaranteed to have the movie in my hands in two days.
- subliminalurge, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17Reason #6: If I'm paying for the content, then I'm killing the client the second the download finishes. I will put bare minimum limits on allowed upload slots, and allowed upload bandwidth. As far as I'm concerned, forking over cash absolves me of any responsibility to be a "good bittorrent citizen".
- TheCod, on 10/12/2007, -2/+16Basically, iTunes is lame. But their sales continue to grow don't they? This is just Bram's way of trying to make some money off of the thing that he created.
- JuliusErving, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14Just had to laugh at warpfox's "downloading to disc" in regard to digital camera pics. Countless times i've had my grandparents ask me "How do i download my pictures onto the computer" or "I want to download my pictures on to Snapfish". It's hilarious, but also rather frustrating.
- Ammo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13I turn to torrent when I want stuff for free, not for when I want to pay for things.
- the_snitch, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12I disagree. Once we move to IPv6, we will never have to worry about NAT and port forwarding again. Ports can be used for what they were originally designed for - identifying applications and processes, not clients.
- MattyLite, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Haha, only if they send me a check reimbursing me for the bandwidth I contribute. Why would I pay to let a company make money off my bandwidth? That's just silly.
- DaveMN, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10DRM is reason enough for me. DRM = no sale.
- psilanthropist, on 10/12/2007, -5/+12TPB, ftw
- lcmatt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7So will BitTorrent Inc be seeding the material 24/7 to provide high speed downloads?
- BOSyooper, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8...unless it is a popular new movie
- everfresh59, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Only way BitTorrent can make this a solid form of revenue is to create software somewhat similar to iTunes. They should also create a payment system much like iStockPhoto, where users can purchase bulk credit. That's my 2 cents on this whole thing....
- meshman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Don't create a store. People will get pissed off, jump on [other service] and ruin it. That was the nice thing about Bittorrent is the ignorant were sold on it not knowing there's [other service] which is a million times better. For the sake of [other service], just leave BT the way it is.
- mattus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Paid BitTorrent will never take off. Whether they're aiming their services towards new users of the technology or existing users, there are just too many stumbling blocks.
For most existing BT users, torrents = piracy. To 'torrent' something means to get it for free - why would anyone pay to download a torrent when they can find the exact same torrent for free? Morality isn't gonna fill in the gap, especially when the legal torrents are likely to be slower 'cause fewer people will use them.
That leaves people who haven't used BT before - but it's simply gonna be too complicated to appeal to the masses. Is Average Joe gonna battle NAT, port forwarding, trackers and dead torrents when he could purchase the same thing with one click in the iTunes store? - timvidal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I do think this is a step in the right directions for p2p services. But most mainstream users like the convenience of Itune and other services because they are simple. BT my be a little on the confusing side especially when telling them they have to set up port-forwarding. Most people on Digg get the concept while most consumers do not have a clue... And DRM is another killing factor on this. Prices are reasonable as long as it doesn't take a day to download. At least they are not suing the company for contributing to the largest pirating network...
- naz37, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6there probable going to use webseeds.
- schroeder, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6UPnP is the most unsafe way to open ports on your router. It should always be disabled. Yeah it works, but any malicious program you happen to get on your computer can open any ports it wants for any purpose it wants. Very bad...
- CiRu5, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6@ 1jaxstate1
I guess you've never heard of UPnP - markdr123, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"Will they start stripping out the legal content from their search service?"
Er, no. Most unlikely. - flernk, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Guh. They should just offer the content for free and add bump advertising to the beginning and end of each show. They would make money AND retain control of their content. I'm not going to hand over a hundreds dollars through a season to watch my 10 favorite shows ($.99 x 25 episodes x 10 shows).
Again, the industry just doesn't understand their market. - JuliusErving, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4One of his reasons just isn't true: "Who uses the official BT client? BitTorrent’s official client has lost out to alternative clients including Azureus and BitComet."
I just tested out the service with utorrent and it works fine. So what does it matter that people don't use the official BT client? - mc7winkie, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Or the market doesn't understand the industry as in your case.
- quomen, on 10/12/2007, -10/+13Basically, paid BitTorrent is just lame.
- lysine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3for all those speculating on utorrent and the mainline client. here's what they've had to say about future development:
"Cohen and his engineers have also periodically enhanced its own BitTorrent client, which Cohen originally wrote. Known as Mainline, the client was last updated in 2005. However, a new version, which a company spokesman said will be released "in the near future," will contain some new enhancements.
That version will support BitTorrent DNA Version 2, what Navin described as an updated network being rolled out now. The new version of Mainline will apparently not be released as an open-source client, as BitTorrent was. "Open-source BitTorrent gives you performance efficiency at the expense of the user experience," Navin said.
The 6-Mbyte client will be BitTorrent's own code; the µTorrent client BitTorrent acquired in December will be used for portable apps. With DNA 2.0, users can start a BitTorrent swarm off of any Web object. The technology also recognizes when the user is Web surfing or using VOIP, gracefully fading into the background and scaling down the network utilization to avoid interfering with the user's other activities, Navin said."
source: http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=201836,00.asp
lol, they're laying it on thick... especially that part about "performance efficiency at the expense of the user experience." wonder what kind of anti-piracy features this new "DNA 2.0" protocol will include? will it be compatible with the old protocol (current one), or only work with the bittorrent store? plenty of questions and there should be some interesting answers in the future.
I forsee a large crackdown on illegal torrent trackers soon. there's no way the official store can compete, and considering the "content partners" are the MPAA, I'm sure they want to protect their investments. - sk545, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'll take DRM if they offer rentals for 99 cents.
- kufu91, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4why not have part of the cost of downloading go the uploaders
that way people have a financial reason to seed things they payed for
the distribution cost of that would be almost nothing as there wouldn't have to be a dedicated seed from the service - Opiate, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2$Topic . 'To kids, 99% of digg';
- JuliusErving, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Well i'm assuming clients such as azareus and bitcomet also work fine with the service. Anyone with those clients installed care to test it out? Also, bittorrent still has an official client other than utorrent up for download on their site:
http://www.bittorrent.com/download - duggmania, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Exactly - with sites like http://www.flixflux.co.uk making it easy to find movie torrents completely free, why would you bother paying for DRM crippled content?
- Mactard, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Anyone notice he didnt mention utorrent?
- uidzero, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Furthermore, downloads require Windows Media Player and works only on Windows machines and is tied to one single PC for now."
I can see this and the DRM (yes I realize part of that is because of the DRM) being a huge reason for it's failure. Though I think most if not all of the issues listed are valid and will contribute to it having a less then stellar launch. - bshock, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1As we say over and over on the Web, competing with free is just business as usual. The trick to it is to provide premium services that people really want.
So what is it about "official" BitTorrent that I can't get anywhere else?
I download via BT frequently, usually to get tv shows that I forgot to record. (Who can remember that "Battlestar Galactica" is now on Sunday nights at 11:00 PM?) I start a download on Monday morning, and by the time I get home from work, I have the show I want to watch. How is Bram going to entice me to pay him for this currently free and adequate system?
Aside from threatening to sue me (which the MPAA will get around to doing soon enough, I imagine), about all I can see him doing is promising much faster downloads. That would be great, if they're fast enough. But right now, a 400 Meg file that downloads in 1 hour is not really more valuable to me than one that downloads in 8 hours. Since I let these things go while I'm asleep or at work, it doesn't really matter to me how soon they're done.
Now, if someone promised me a file that downloaded in 5-10 minutes, I might be interested in paying a small fee -- perhaps $3 - 5, about like a video rental. I would even be willing to accept commercials bundled along with this file. Basically, we're talking about a video store model.
However, unlike at the video store, I would not pay for DRMed content, or content that expired after a few days or viewings. (Returning the DVD to the store is essentially like expiring video.) I don't give a flying fornication about EULAs or other rationalizations for the deepening myth of sacred "intellectual property" that the entertainment industry pulls out of its anus. If I put something on my machine, it's mine. If you try to stick your fingers into my property, I will shoot them off. - dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Yes they will, just not in the typical "Search PirateBay and download [some application]" torrent methodology - The torrent distrubutation model makes sense - Theoretically you only need to upload the file once, and from there on, the clients ("customers") do the rest of the uploading.
As for port-forwarding, most routers have uPnP enabled by default, anyone who disables it knows enough to setup port fowarding.
Most of these problems can be solved with either increased popularity : "Internet Service Providers dislike BitTorrent" - More clients legitimeltly using Bittorrent will force ISP's to stop shaping torrent traffic, or at least, customers moving to other ISP's because of said shaping will force them to stop..
And "Content on BitTorrent Store ain’t all that" will also improve if it becomes more popular.
A decent, user-friendly client and uPnP will sort the "BitTorrent’s not easy, especially for novices"
As for the "Why pay to play?" thing - There will be people who will never pay for most things, that's why piracy exists, you will never change that (As long as there is paid-for content anyway)
In, maybe 2-5 years, I could image devices like a cross between the AppleTV device and the Windows Home Server, which functions as a router (Solving the NAT problems), has ports to plug in USB external harddrives (Solving storage problems), then it either connects directly to your TV, or has cheap (£50?) thin-clients that allow you to view content, set up favourite TV shows which automatically get download when their avalible (Much like http://www.tvrss.net and an RSS-based torrent downloader, but slightly more legally..).
Maybe a system to flag films you'd like to see, and when they're released, their downloaded - When the download is complete it adds it to a list of unwatched films.
A system when you setup things you'd like to see, rather than "I want to see that film, right now damnit" will work far better with downloads - The downloads will slowly complete, then they'll think "Hm, I fell like watching [film name] that downloaded last week".
The biggest problem with something like that is storage, such a setup would need a lot of storage, espically compared to a "Download these shows, watch them now then delete them" (which would rely on extremely fast downloads or streaming). You'd need to be able to store, say, 20 films and a bunch of TV series at once, which at a decent quality (For standard-PAL video, storing a lot of HD films would require a currently-insane amount of harddrive space) could easily 500GB+ of storage
But, your right, "To 'torrent' something means to get it for free" which is exactly why any company wanting to make a legal, distrubted content delivery service *needs* to word it carefully. Bittorrent is nearly-universally associated with piracy, same with "downloading" to some extend ("Downloading a song" to most people means illegally downloading) - All people should really think of the system is "The magic box that makes my favourite films/TV shows appear on my TV", nothing more. Currently the price of storage (which is getting fairly cheap now, but a terabyte of storage still costs quite a bit), the price of bandwidth - In the UK at least, most ISP's cap at around 40GB a month, although the larger ISP's are begining to offer unlimited-usage packages, BT just started offering it this month, AOL Broadband has had it for a while, same with Blueyonder or Telewest or Virgin or whatever they are called now.
When a router-ish device, which can attach to your TV, have a bout 1TB of storage, and uncapped broadband connections are widespread (Or are cheap to buy), something like this, or the AppleTV device or similar, will take of
I still think Microsoft have a great opportunity to do TV/Film-downloads with the Xbox 360 - It already has the capability to download and play videos, it's connected to the internet and a TV, and is in a lot of people's living-rooms already..
Anyway, this post is far too long, damn bordum..
- Ben - alanism, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0most of us will still pirate.
but i can see them doing okay with they can provide consistently faster and realiable seeds for HD content. Or selling games and other large software makes a lot more sense for publishers than the traditional downloads or the stores even. so there's definitely a market for it. - BLueSS, on 10/12/2007, -6/+6Reason #1:
"500 Internal Server Error" on the main page. - louse101, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I just dugg a list of responses to all Malik's points, here: http://digg.com/tech_news/Response_To_Om_Malik_s_List_of_Reasons_Why_The_Legal_BitTorrent_DL_s_Won_t
- louse101, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Dammit, the direct link is http://www.techsmessage.com/2007/02/26/response-to-om-maliks-list-of-reasons-why-the-legal-bittorrent-dls-wont-work/
No idea why the Digg link i posted before didn't work =( - bobothn, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3Just so you know newsgroups suck. why would i pay to download stuff i can get for free might as well just buy the damn songs if i am doing that.
- bromac, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Sell?
People aren't on BitTorrent to *buy* anything... - psdiao, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Didn't BitTorrent buy uTorrent a while ago, so isn't uTorrent the official bit torrent client now?
- jawbreaker4fs, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Or you rent too many movies in a short period of time and they blacklist you.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -12/+3@ the chumps - digging me down doesn't change what I said from being right. : )
- Lorddias, on 10/12/2007, -11/+1Looks like I ticked off the apple fanboys.
- Lorddias, on 10/12/2007, -12/+1What's next, iTorrent? This is totally going to flop.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -14/+3iTunes is lame to the tune of having made about 200 BILLION CENTS!
Obviously there are two "markets" in the P2P world.
There's chumps, who feel everything is owed to them and should be free because they managed to get on the internet!!!! I'm looking at you psilanthropist and SeaBass22, but that stereotyping applies to lots of digg users. For some reason the chumps also think the rest of the world thinks they way they do, contrary to overwhelming evidence that the rest of the world works on a "money" system. I'm not sure who supports the chumps financially, I like to think they all live in cardboard boxes under some bridge stealing wifi on stolen laptops and scrounging for food. There's certainly no other way they could extend their "everything should be free and the world owes me" philosophy outside the internet,
Then there's the rest of the world, who don't give a crap if they have to pay 99c for a song or $2.99 for a movie because they're used to paying for stuff EVERY DAY and they have jobs that make it possible. These people have the money, time and the INCLINATION to buy stuff like songs, rent movies online from netflix etc.
So please my little pirate princesses, stfu, you don't represent anything other than a vocal and increasingly stupid sounding minority. Enjoy whatever it is you download, but don't try and undermine the efforts of a company who gave you the tools and then sought bigger things, at no risk, harm or danger to you. Just accept that there is a "freaky business model" out there where consumers are willing to pay for products, and move along.
Normally I agree with anything Malik says by default but I think he missed the boat this time. - cr4ft, on 10/12/2007, -26/+9From the article
"BitTorrent’s not easy, especially for novices"
Oh wow, who would've thought clicking your mouse twice would be difficult?
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