stuart test blog

Mark Cuban recently posted on his blog about how he thinks that BitTorrent is facing some challenges, and the (slightly-biased) Torrent Freak blog picked up on some of his points and argues against them. I actually agree with some of Mark’s comments but I think that they have been taken out of context slightly.

* Conflicting Clients – I think he means that in the future, media companies may ask users to download a custom client in order to download their movie files. For example, you may have a Sony movie downloader, and a Fox movie client, and a Paramount downloader too. All these different clients would try to use the bittorrent protocol which could cause conflicts on computers.

* End Users dont understand how P2P works – I don’t know for sure, but I’d say that the majority of bittorrent traffic on the internet today is from users that DO know what they are doing and are using it to download illegal content. These users often belong to bittorent-site communities that have rules about leechers. The maxim is usually that you allow other community members to download as much from you, as you have from them – this keeps the community going. In a commercial world, why would you donate your bandwidth and traffic to other users that are downloading from commercial sites? This only helps the corporations save on bandwidth costs. If I’m paying $10 to download a 2GB movie, and I have a 10GB or 20GB traffic limit each month, I don’t want anyone else uploading content from me – especially if it’s going to cost me extra money.

I think that once end-users understand that they are only helping corporations save money on costs, they would be less inclined to give up their precious bandwidth.