I’ve written before about how useful I believe the bittorrent protocol is, and today I wanted to share something with you guys that you may not have known about (I’m pretty with it, as the kids say, and I didn’t even know about this until a couple of weeks ago): Bittorrent Bundles. The BT Bundles are all legal, official, and released by artists to promote and share their work with their audience. Instead of paying for server space and bandwidth, artists seed files, and let the bittorrent community do the rest.
You can find tons of bundles at https://bundles.bittorrent.com/. Here’s Moby’s Innocents, De La Soul’s Smell the Da.I.S.Y, and Thom Yorke’s newest solo work, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes . Most of the artists release a couple tracks for free, with the option to pay them for the full album. These are incredibly fast torrents, too, because so many people seed them.
Whenever someone tries to argue that torrents are just for piracy, I show them the BT Bundles, because it’s such an effective way for artists to promote themselves and share their creations with their audience.
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I’ve been thinking about torrenting some of my books, or at least, offering them as an option for readers.
It would be fun but also kind of silly because most e-book files are small and wouldn’t benefit much from torrenting instead of direct downloads.
Except for Swarm Discovery. You might reach a couple new audience members who are browsing Swarm.
I wish this would somehow work for podcast hosting… that would be a great way for people to be able to host their files for free (video or audio)
That seems like a great idea. I’m going to do some poking around and see if those dots aren’t already connected somehow.
Be sure to let me know if you find anything!
Found it well-discussed here…
http://www.reddit.com/r/podcasts/comments/1p8qe4/easing_bandwidth_costs_with_torrents/
…and I think the pros/cons are very well outlined there.
But the short story: Yes it can work. Problem is achieving critical mass of people who would receive it that way. Vast majority just want it to show up in iTunes or another major player (pun intended).
Maybe look into Bittorrent Sync, afaik you can just designate a folder on your system and any file in it can be shared with everybody via a single link. The guys at jupiterbroadcasting.com use it to share the sources for their “news podcast” Unfilter with their audience. Many of said sources are audio files, so it should work well enough for distributing podcasts as well.
Chris, the owner of Jupiter Broadcasting also is an overall nice guy and I’d bet he’d help you and answer some of your questions if you ask him.
Why wouldn’t it?
Big game companies often use bittorrent in their game launchers to release new patches for their games. Blizzard uses it in their launcher for WoW, Diablo III, StarCraft II. Notice the “Enable peer-to-peer” option in settings for the battle.net launcher. There are a plenty of legitimate uses for the technology. People used to same many of the same things about ftp, and even BBS’s and (x,y,z)modem back in the day.
Do you know bitlove? –> http://bitlove.org/help/podcaster
Again proof that tools and such are not bad, but how people use/abuse tools and such that could be bad.
Let’s not confuse “forever minus a day” copyright extension (which incidentally is manifestly unconstitutional) with “good”.
Nice article Wil. My friend from work sent me the link because he knows I’m into bittorrent. I thought you might be interested in a little app I built. It’s called TorrentRover. I’m still working on it, and it only works (currently) on Windows PCs, but I’m pretty proud of it. If you do decide to give it a try, let me know what you think.
Why not offer a bitorrent download for the tabletop season 3 kickstarter videos for those that donated?
Idea. Why not distribute the Season3 of Tabletop via Bittorrent.
BTW: BittorentSync is a great “Dropbox” without exposing the data in the cloud.
I have only used bit torrent for two weeks and agree on the awesomeness. . I’m using the uTorrent for the tablet. I Don’t know all the terms, such as “seeding “. Time to hit up Wiki.;)
I its great for artists to post works for folks to sample before buying.
Monkey -my thoughts too. Wonder if Wil’s shows could be “torrented “? More can see them and maybe hollar at TV stations to put more on even if in syndication.
Wonders if Dr.Who is torrented *.
Is there any way perhaps to track from one group to another according to similarities, or to find a genre, or something like that? This sounds nice – but all I really see is a screen full of album covers with nothing to tell me who these groups are that I’ve never heard of, or what kind of music it is… Pretty, but pretty un-user friendly in my opinion.
Why don’t you use torrent as an optional way to download the upcoming TableTop episodes for backers?
Would require less transfer on your end. As long as the original host just sticks around for the first bunch of people, the swarm would fix the rest.
WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE POOR RECORD CORPORATIONS?
BitTorrent is also great for distributing free software, as it keeps the project’s bandwidth costs down. LibreOffice uses BitTorrent quite effectively.
Humble Bundle has torrents for many of their items. I’m sure this helps with data charges they pay for the regular downloads.
I was wondering if this is a subtle hint that this system or one like it may be used to distribute Tabletop Season 3 to the backers?