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Can Porn Use BT?
(Article Contributed By Dino - Posted on October 28th, 2009)
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If you’ve been reading my articles for any length of time, you’ll already know that sometimes I’ll come up with an idea that’s kinda strange. I normally get these strange ideas in the shower (something else you would know if you read my articles) but this one is a little different.
This one came about because of, well, boredom. When you’re working at 5am and you’ve done more or less everything you wanted to do for the day, the mind wanders. When mine wanders, I normally head on over to a Torrent site and see what’s around.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s called BitTorrent - a P2P system that is becoming increasingly popular as time goes on. BT works by connecting peers together, sharing chunks of a file between them, creating a distributed “whole” file that everyone, with enough time, can download.
The system still uses a central server (called a “tracker”) but the tracker itself doesn’t serve the files – the users do on their own bandwidth. In fact, the tracker uses very little bandwidth itself – so little that you’d probably not even notice it.
To download a file using BT, you first have to install a small client that’s available just about anywhere nowadays. Next, you download the .torrent file – this contains information about the download itself (its size, name, type and so on). Running that file through the client starts the client connecting to other peers (people who’ve not downloaded the whole file yet) and seeds (people who have the entire file and are sharing bits of it to create the distributed whole).
Once it’s running, it’s just a question of time. The more people upload, the faster everyone gets the finished file.
Okay, so here’s what I was thinking; what do we use in our business that (a) takes up a lot of our bandwidth, (b) is in constant demand and (c) gets a lot of clicks on TGPs?
Answer: Video.
BitTorrent has one feature that I just love. The .torrent files used to start a download are tiny compared to the eventual resulting file. A .torrent file for a 4gb download is usually about 300k in size – sometimes a little more, depending on how many files are within the torrent.
Another feature that you can find on some freely available trackers is password protection. The standard tracker will let anyone and their dog download the files, but there are some versions out there that will only let people with the correct password and ID download.
This method of distributing large files with very little cost to the supporting site has become so popular that mainstream uses it all the time. Blizzard used it very recently to distribute the client for their upcoming game, World of Warcraft. Serving the 1Gb+ download to thousands of users would’ve cost them a pretty penny – doing it with torrent cost them next to nothing.
So given all these facts (small bandwidth for tracker, allows large files to be downloaded for little cost to the supporting site, ease of implementation etc.) it could have a lot of uses for our industry. Here’s just a few of the ideas I had that you could use BitTorrent for:
- A Torrent TGP - An interesting idea, and one that submitting webmasters would definitely love, since it cuts down their bandwidth bill drastically. You set up a TGP in the usual way for video galleries, but the galleries you list don’t link directly to the video files on the submitter’s server – they link to a .torrent that’s connected to a tracker that you run.
You could also skip the galleries completely and just link directly to the .torrent files in the listings (in the same way you’d link to a submitted or hosted gallery). Each link to a torrent would be accompanied by a link to the sponsor for sales referrals.
- Paysite Videos - This is probably the main reason I thought of using BitTorrent in the first place. There’s lots of paysites that offer full DVD videos to download, usually compressed with DiVX or a similar codec. Serving a 800Mb file to hundreds of members is going to cost a lot of money, but if you couple a tracker with password protection and tie it into your membership database, you can let your members download videos from each other, as long as you seed each one.
It’s something that you might want to consider if you’re running a paysite with a lot of video to download and you’re trying to cut your expenses. The TGP idea is one of those “off the wall” add-on ideas I had while thinking about the main topic of this article, but it’s still something that could be a nice experimental project for someone out there.
However, there is another side to it. BT has traditionally been used to distribute copyrighted content by pirates, so it does have a large stigma attached to it. Recently, Comcast blocked upstream BT traffic on their massive cable data network, effectively cutting off millions of subscribers from using the system for any reason. Many places now use BT as a legitimate tool, and it's a shame that this side of the system has such a negative outlook by mainstream.
Anyway, if you’d like to learn more about BitTorrent and trackers, check out the official site of the P2P system at the link above.
Till tomorrow, pimps!
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