News NTL will use BitTorrent

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/02/13/ntl_bit_torrent/

 

It's a clever idea in terms of infrastructure, however they are going to have to come up with a very user friendly UI if it is to appeal to its 'Joe Bloggs' user base.

My only concern with this is the quality of the movie, especially with the forthcoming HD era. I will not download any movie, no matter how convienent, if it is in anyway inferior to the original source. This may well be the case though, as seen by the mp3 market. Most people seem to be happy paying for a 128kbps song, possibly because they only ever play it on a portable device.

However, with films I like most people watch them on a normal television (crt, lcd or plasma etc); thus any compression used would be noticable (low bitrate channels like e4 on Sky digital are a great example).

 

Rubert i have to agree with you, i pride myself with my AV setup i have spent alot of money getting the right stuff to make sure that what i watch looks and sounds at its best, ive found that when films are compressed its mainly the audio that suffers the most (more than to picture) and you only get stereo sound, they drop the dolby digital, DTS, THX etc as this takes up alot of space.

It will be interesting to see what happens and how the big DVD rental companies react to this

 

Indeed Monkey,

I didn't want to mention my £3000+ AV setup, as it can alienate people; however your right about the audio streams as well, I would be very sceptical if they included full DD/DTS soundtracks.

 

so you can either buy to download torrents or hope over to thepiratebay etc and get them for free, tough choice!

 

The whole point is that its legal, i guess they're hoping for an itunes like success. I think they might have problems keeping all the torrents alive though..

 

Yeah, because a form of entertainment is available illegally for free, does not mean a paid for legal alternative won't be created, iTunes is a very good example.

Believe it or not Fusen, only a very small minority of people a: have the technical knowhow and b: are willing to break the law.

Personally I would be willing to pay for a movie download if: the price was reasonable, the quality was of a very high standard, the choice was expansive and perhaps most importantly it was easy to get.

Remember, it will be Joe Bloggs who makes up the core user base of these legal download services, not a small percentage of 'l33t ha><zors' who know where to go and what to use to get their stuff for free; thus the points I made above are essential for a service to be successful.

 

Doesnt Sky do something similar with the Box Office service and a sky plus box, where as you pay about £3.50 to watch a film and you can download it to your Plus box and play it back at will, (but you only get 14 day's before its deleted atuomatically) and they have a shwoing every 15mins as well, and its in dolby digital. there are alot of homes with sky already and they will be cometeing with a big company for this.

the other thing i like about the box office is you can watch films before they go on DVD release, now will bit torrent be able to get this sort of deal cos i'd imagine that sky has a exclusive deal with the film companies to get this deal and pay alot of money to do so

 

@Monkey200SX

I think BitTorrents involvement will most likely be purely technical.

 

This is true. However, Sky+ users are limited to about a dozen films which are shown for about a month.
What we need is an online movie rental company - choose what you want to watch from a vast database, pay for the download (which comes in at a blistering speed & is dvd quality - dolby digital etc). Once you have it you can play it as many times as you like for 24 hours (for example) and then it deletes itself from your hdd.
If there was such a service - I would use it.

 

If they host the trackers and keep a seed of every film on their servers (permanently) then, even when a film gets older and not a lot of people are seeding it, it will still be available from the server.

The advantage of using torrents is that it helps a great deal when a film is new and 10,000 people all try to get it at once, because the bandwidth demands are greatly reduced on the server, thanks to peer-to-peer transfers.

If the software were written so that all films on a user's computer were open for peering by default, and if NTL gave uncapped uploads, and given that there would be nothing illegal going on (hence no chance of being arrested for sharing), I think you would find a lot of seeds remaining active long after the initial burst of downloading activity.