Patrick just noted: "One thing to keep track of -- if BitTorrent begins carrying more legitimate traffic and becomes more than just a fun tool for WELL types, then there will be a serious need for bandwidth."

Robert X. Cringely has made a couple of calculations:

It is very hard to get your mind around the enormity not of the Internet, but of the Internet-on-steroids we'd need to absorb most other forms of communication and media distribution, but let's try anyway. "Desperate Housewives," in its puny 320-by-240 iTunes incarnation, occupies an average of 210 megabytes per episode. A full-resolution version would be larger still. In theory, it would be four times as big, but practically it would probably come in at double the size or 420 megabytes. But let's stick with the little iTunes version for this example.

Twenty million viewers, on average, watch "Desperate Housewives" each week in about 10 million U.S. households. That's 210 megabytes times 10 million downloads, or 2.1 petabytes of data to be downloaded per episode. Fortunately for the download business model, not everyone is trying to watch the show at the same time or in real time, so iTunes, in this example, has some time to do all those downloads. Let's give them three days. The question on the table is what size Internet pipe would it take to transfer 2.1 petabytes in 72 hours? I did the math, and it requires 64 gigabits-per-second, which would require an OC-768 fiber link and two OC-256s to fulfill.

There isn't an Internet backbone provider with that much capacity, much less excess capacity. Fortunately, it wouldn't have to all go over a single link and could, instead, be injected centrally into the network and fan out to viewers all over the country, in which case the OC-48 and OC-192 links used by Global Crossing, Sprint, MCI and others just might be enough.

But that's just one popular show. What will we do, then, with American Idol?

[A] true media market is going to require more components than are currently offered in Bit Torrent. There have to be payment systems, rights management systems, and some underlying quality-of-service layer that can save the day just in case you are the only person in the world who wants to watch that particular episode of "The Green Hornet."

posted by James DeLong @ 2:19 PM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines...

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