bit-torrent at you-tube

Saw a presentation on YouTube last night in Entrepreneurship class. Apparently the advertising revenue at YouTube is not matching the bandwidth costs. According to our presenter, they are paying a million dollars a month for bandwidth.

Idea to help: offer bittorrent in addition to downloads from centralized servers.

Doing this would require creation of a "youtube accelerator" application which would run on the home computers of participating participants, in exchange for premium you-tube access. These accelerator boxes would take some disk space and function as a distributed cache of the most-downloaded films at any time, and serve these to the other participating viewers using something very similar to if not exactly the bittorrent protocol.

The you-tube tracker would be a very smart tracker and would connect peers to peers near them on the network.

Accelerator-enabled computers would have links to the accelerator network socket on localhost instead of the remote streaming server for the movie to view, for viewing the movie in the web page.

The resulting torrent network could become the dual-level torrent network that gives preferred access to paying customers, which I have suggested in previous blogs -- or at least at denny's after more than one LUG meeting.

Having an application running on lots of participants computers would be a step towards a "people's grid" for use in CPU-intensive tasks such as frame rendering.

The participants could be paid for participating in money as well as in premium status.

Bandwidth could be further reduced by using multicast to push oft-requested content out to the accelerators.

downside: it would be a management nightmare, compared with just throwing money at bandwidth.

If youtube's business plan is to establish market share while the price of bandwidth drops to where their operation becomes profitable later, that makes sense and they need make no changes

to conclude, integrating torrent with youtube would be one approach to reducing the amount of centralized bandwidth that their streaming farms require.

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