Wednesday, August 03, 2005
BitTorrent goes upmarket
BitTorrent goes upmarket
BitTorrent could be the answer to on-line content delivery it's demise. The latest version doesn't require centralised torrents making it difficult to shut down sites.
BitTorrent is very clever decentralised peer-to-peer (p2p) software that ensures data is actually downloaded from a variety of sources and the client puts the pieces together again, so it may only pull a few KB/s from individual peers but several 100Kb/s from the aggregated peers.
Each client then also serves the content it's pulled to other peers.
This actually makes very efficient use of available bandwidth and eases content delivery and piracy, though there are DRM (digital rights management) systems that can work with BitTorrent.
BitTorrent accounts for a large percentage of p2p traffic, if the DRM issues can be sorted it could change the way content is distributed.
BitTorrent could be the answer to on-line content delivery it's demise. The latest version doesn't require centralised torrents making it difficult to shut down sites.
BitTorrent is very clever decentralised peer-to-peer (p2p) software that ensures data is actually downloaded from a variety of sources and the client puts the pieces together again, so it may only pull a few KB/s from individual peers but several 100Kb/s from the aggregated peers.
Each client then also serves the content it's pulled to other peers.
This actually makes very efficient use of available bandwidth and eases content delivery and piracy, though there are DRM (digital rights management) systems that can work with BitTorrent.
BitTorrent accounts for a large percentage of p2p traffic, if the DRM issues can be sorted it could change the way content is distributed.
