Thanks to all the recent publicity, Simon Carless reports on his ffwd blog that LegalTorrents, a site for legitimate music torrent files that is experimenting with broadcatching, has given away an additional 300gb of music (broadcatching in the dark fatman ides?). 300gb! I guess broadcatching works.
Outside the System has an interesting analysis of the possibility of micropayments combined with broadcatching (BitTorrent + BitPass: Ethos & Practicalities). Most interestingly, the author goes into some detail regarding the ethos of the concept, what one might also call the social norms.
Now, I'm not a big fan of micropayments, but I think there might well be a market for certain Big Media Objects (BMOs) if the payment isn't too small. For example, the author imagines films being made available through this method for $2-3. I could certainly see this sort of payment making sense for a series, such as the awesome Red vs. Blue, where you buy an entire season for, say, $5-20. Of course, a subscription model for all-you-can eat content *cough*music*cough* might be a very good model as well.
The best part of the piece though is the analysis of the ethos of BitTorrent and payments:
Does this mean that there is a common ground between independents and the BitTorrent community that allows for the introduction of transactions into the equation? There very might well be, and there seems to be little technical barrier in experimenting and seeing firsthand. It might even be a common ground that traditional media companies and the artists they distribute don't/can't/won't share, making this an emerging system ripe for independent adoption over corporate adoption. There are also tantalizing questions I still have about how this microtransaction model could interact with the tracker also running on that webserver -- the potential to allow fans to favor those "in the club" versus "outside the club" at the peering level, which could reinforce the idea that the independent media creator and their Internet fans are all in this together.
This is something that I have been thinking a great deal about and I think that there is something quite interesting here. I believe that a well-designed market using broadcatching would encourage cooperation between creators and consumers, turning distribution into a collaborative effort. Sure, corporations could play this game, but independents could be on an almost equal footing, both would have consumers as their partners. I'm still thinking about the possibilities here, but I think they may be one of the most significant aspects of broadcatching. Broadcatching could be much more than what the Hollywood Liberation Army calls "the holy grail of a profitable business model for independent movie-makers on the web" (BitTorrent, BitPass & Outside the System).
Unlimited Freedom has some interesting comments about the whole broadcatching concept (BitTorrent and Broadcatching). Most of his post concerns what he sees as various drawbacks of the BitTorrent protocol. While he makes some good points, overall I don't think they really undermine the broadcatching paradigm.
BT differs from other P2P systems in the algorithm that it uses to distribute data. That's what makes it work so well for large files. But there's no reason P2P networks couldn't be enhanced to use that algorithm. If they did so, they would be SUPERIOR to BT for almost every purpose.
No longer would you have to find a .torrent file host to download data. No longer would someone have to do something special and act as a seeder - they could just put the data file into their P2P shared directory and it would be available to the world. No longer would you have to beg people to keep their BT clients (instances of which are specific to the file being downloaded) running after the download finishes, scolding them about being "leechers" if they don't upload at least as much as they downloaded.
Actually, some P2P programs already implement versions of swarm download protocols. However, that doesn't mean they are necessarily superior to BitTorrent. In particular, the advantage of broadcatching is that you have RSS feeds letting people know when fresh content is available. Consequently, you are more likely to have people hitting the .torrent file shortly thereafter, which makes the whole swarm download thing work better. With other forms of P2P, even if you get an RSS notification of fresh content, you'll have to wait for that content to diffuse through the P2P network. Even for very popular files this might take hours or days. With broadcatching, because of the centralization of the seeding server, content diffuses as quickly as the RSS feed.
There is also a question of search horizon for large media objects with normal P2P. The most popular files would be available in the local P2P network, but less popular files would be more difficult to find. Centralized seeding servers mean that the search horizon is virtually infinite. Moreover, you might not get much swarm download benefit for less popular files with normal P2P, but a centralized seeding service would aggregate even widely dispersed interest in less popular files.
The question of leechers is an issue, but since broadcatching would be mostly automated (update RSS, check for new files, initiate BitTorrent for new files), chances are the defaults could be set to let the BitTorrent application run fairly regularly in the background.
Undoubtedly, there are improvements that can be made to the protocols, especially with regard to usability for the average consumer. Those advances will come with time.
Slashdot has actually covered the BitTorrent & RSS concept before (RSS & BT Together?), but the latest is probably the most interesting as the concept begins to sink in (RSS And BitTorrent, Together At Last). Below are a couple of interesting comments:
People keep trying to make BitTorrent something it isn't. And really, we should be fighting its corporate adoption in any form, as it's simply an attempt to shift server bandwidth costs to the client. ISPs eat that right now, but we're going to metered access if this keeps up.
Which is effectively getting us to pay for website access/services, but instead of giving the money to the content creators we'll be giving it to ISPs instead and paying in bandwidth besides. So this is a bad idea.
The way I figure it, with this bittorrent-RSS combination and a slight modification of torrent watching sites like animesuki [animesuki.com] we will essentially have a fansubbed anime online tivo at our disposal. Actually, you could have probably done that even without RSS, though it does simplify matters. The only limitations are our bandwidth and hard drives. Which actually are pretty limiting these days, especially with p2p being frequently capped.