BitTorrent Explained

Perhaps the largest fear that executives in the entertainment industry have is the 'Napsterization' of their content. Just a few years ago, it was thought that the file sizes for video made them less vulnerable than the swapping of MP3 files that afflicted the music industry.

It is not unusual for the file sizes of a 1-hour TV-quality show to range from 200Mb to 700Mb (depending upon the format). Likewise, a DVD quality movie is over 4Gb's in size and the smallest usable size after compression is 1Gb.

However, technology has evolved and most of today's fears center around a free shareware technology called BitTorrent.

Bram Cohen (the inventory of BitTorrent) showed his code to the world at a hacker conference in 2002, as a free, open source project aimed at geeks who needed a cheap way to swap Linux software online. But the real audience turns out to be TV and movie fanatics. It takes hours to download a ripped episode of Alias or Monk off Kazaa, but BitTorrent can do it in minutes. As a result, more than 20 million people have downloaded the BitTorrent application.

According to CacheLogic, 35% of all Internet traffic is BitTorrent P2P file swapping. BigChampagne, an internet-research firm in Beverly Hills, California, suggest that at least 10% of the content on P2P networks is legal, and does not violate the entertainment industry's copyrights. That means that 90% probably does violate copyrighted material.

With so much illegal traffic, it's no surprise that a clampdown has started: In November, the Motion Picture Association of America began suing downloaders of movies, in order to, as the MPAA's anti-piracy chief John Malcolm put it, "avoid the fate of the music industry."

You could think of BitTorrent as Napster redux - another rumble in the endless copyright wars. But BitTorrent is something deeper and more subtle. It's a technology that is changing the landscape of broadcast media. It is also a technology that can reshape how the Internet can become an ideal global information-storage system.

In the article listed to the right, various aspects of BitTorrent are explored. The sincere goal of VODscape is two-fold. First, the illegal usage of BitTorrent will have an impact on video -- in particular television -- so understanding this phenomenon is important. Second, BitTorrent is a very useful technology for all sorts of legal business and personal uses.

Meanwhile, the technologists are continuing to write their software code. “P2P doesn't need a case made in its favor—it's just technology. Once it's out of the box you can't put it back in the box, and that's the end of that,” says Mr Cohen—speaking, as you would expect of a P2P pioneer, over Skype's P2P telephone network.