Updaters/patchers for some popular games (Blizzard stuff, League of Legends, etc.) use P2P methods to reduce hosting requirements when pushing big updates to hundreds of thousands/millions of players.
I'm sure there's other use cases, but I'm not sure what they'd be.
Peer-to-peer only ever made sense for popular stuff that people won't pay for. By definition there is little business opportunity in markets where people don't want to pay.
>By definition there is little business opportunity in markets where people don't want to pay.
Counterexample: network TV, radio, facebook.com, gmail.com, pretty much all of the ad-supported web.
>Peer-to-peer only ever made sense for popular stuff that people won't pay for.
Counterexample: Skype (freeium model on a P2P network). The content wasn't "popular" it was private phone conversations and people paid for it.
Counterexample: Bitcoin (runs on a P2P network). People pay fees to miners so that the network relays their transactions.
Counterexample: The internet. A giant P2P inter-network with all sorts of different business relationships. Many of which involve paying someone to send a packet that is only meaningful to a particular party.
Yeah. The article is like "everyone at BitTorrent Inc said Cohen is brilliant, so he's brilliant". BitTorrent is a shit way to move files that only makes sense if your users are willing to subsidise your bandwidth for you. If you look at how big files are moved on the net in practice it's all professional CDNs. BitTorrent is hardly used outside piracy.
>170 million people used the protocol every month, according to the company’s website. Facebook and Twitter use it to distribute updates to their servers. Florida State University has used it to distribute large scientific datasets to its researchers. Blizzard Entertainment has used BitTorrent to let players download World of Warcraft. The company’s site boasts that the protocol moves as much as 40 percent of the world’s Internet traffic each day.
Doesn't sound like a "shit protocol that only pirates use" to me.
Exactly - I live in an area where lots of people have 50+ Mb symmetric connections, and BitTorrent gave us all a dream that we could all use those connections without everything having to be transferred over the backbone.
I'm not sure about that. A lot of what I've read about sounds like they were chasing Netflix with a lot of cash but no idea how to compete.
The article mentions that big cos are using BitTorrent for cluster upgrades. There's a lot of cash in enterprise networking. BitTorrent is basically a large blob multicast protocol.
BitTorrent Sync was a decent product too. What would have happened had they put $30 mil behind a push to take sync from Dropbox and Box instead of sidelining it? Seems like they spun out the best contender they had. It'd be funny if the spinoff succeeds.
It could be the classic situation of FOSS. They had a product people would've paid for if sold on its advantages. They gave it away for free. It got picked up by tons of freeloaders. With free version out & good enough, they weren't able to figure out how to make money off it. Messed themselves up.
