WARNING: This is not about piracy, so don’t link to any “pirate” material sites.
However, it is rather obvious that the main thing Torrents are used for is piracy. I remember when Napster was brand new. You essentially connected to others.
That kind of stuff, along with Gnutella, dominated. Then, Bit Torrent came around and that is now the main way share files(usually illegally).
Is anything coming along that we know of to try and replace torrents? What new advantages can they develop?
We use torrents because it makes it cheaper to distribute content by sharing resources (especially un-metered resources). At some point service providers could provide a similar service that makes optimal use of their particular network configuration by directing computers to get content from the “nearest” neighbors. Alternately, content that is known to be in high demand could be broadcasted (e.g., UDP with lots of redundancy to handle dropped packets) so that each user doesn’t have to set up their own connection. Or, bandwidth could get so high that it’s not necessary to use torrent technology.
The torrent protocol has proven to be very adaptable. It’s not an internet standard or anything, so if one or two popular clients add a new feature, it can become the de facto standard very quickly.
Like everything listed here:
So, it seems likely that the future will still be called torrents and you’ll use a torrent client, even if the technology evolves.
Veoh, part owned by Time Warner, uses torrentlike technology for its downloading.
Which I’ve always found hilarious with the amount of copyright infringement of Time Warner properties that goes on there.
Torrents are excellent ways to move large files provided they are being shared by a large number of people. They also make a good way for people with slow connections to be able to share, although they can’t contribute much.
The Japanese with programs like Perfect Dark have already come across with technology that is great at hiding file shares but the price of this anonymity is a very fast connection (minimum 5.0) and a hard drive of at least 80gs dedicated to the files themseleves.
Few Westerners have this, so bittorrent remains very effective at distrubuting files, legal or illegal over a designated group of people.
The flip of torrents is the fact that in a group if the requirement is a ratio of 1:1 it’s hard to get that ratio and that drives people to other forms like direct shares (example: Rapid Share)
Personally, I prefer Usenet. Alt. Binaries.* in fact…
Yes, but Veoh is horrible, so what is the point of mentioning it?