Would Bittorrent Fix Xbox Live?
Let’s be honest, the video marketplace of Xbox Live had some pretty spectacular problems during the service’s launch. While Major Nelson is doing his best to address the service’s hiccups, those of us who were hoping to download movies and TV are shivering out in the cold or are going back to iTunes.
Now, those crazy guys over at Gizmodo have come up with a solution: institute bittorrent technology with the marketplace. While it’s something that Microsoft would probably never be willing to use, here’s Gizmodo’s list of benefits by instituting this system:
1. Users can have the option for faster downloads through Live’s P2P sharing network.
2. By Microsoft heavily controlling super-seeding (distributing different parts of files evenly), a P2P-shared file could hit an efficient early transfer/share rate.
3. For a portion of your upstream bandwidth (that could be specified by user), gamers are able to download faster (and as a top uploader, you get access to top downloading speeds).
4. Microsoft rewards power users with points per preset upload amount (1gb=50 Live points).
5. Brian Lam stops getting error messages.
6. Unicorns return to Earth.
I personally couldn’t care less about the first five reasons… but, unicorns? Oh, man, here I come!
Why Xbox Video Service Needs BitTorrent [Gizmodo]
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to on 26 November 2006
· Comments (4)
Other stuff like this: bittorrent, gizmodo, major nelson, video marketplace, xbox 360
I haven’t had any problems downloading Southpark or Invader Zim episodes.
I don’t think the movie pricing is correct, so I haven’t tried that out yet.
Unicorns = I’m down.
unicorns make my cry… :(
This isn’t the first time this idea has been batted around, and it’s no less good this time around. Torrenting has a bad name because of it’s sordid history, but the tech is absolutely sound, especially in this sort of distribution scenario.
1Gb = 50 points as a reward is probably a little OTT (it makes out that the value of a show is just the cost of delivery, which lets be fair: is a bit insulting to people to make them), bit it wouldn’t take a genius accountant to figure out a just reward for reducing the strain on MS’s servers.
It’s even surprisingly fair: you only get paid for the work you contribute, which only happens if there are enough people around to want what you like, which means rarer (less popular) material ends up costing a little more. It’s like mass voting the price of a show down.
Are MS smart enough to do this though? Absolutely not. This isn’t their style. Smells too much like linux hippyism.