Reflecting on Bram Cohen's talk, I thought I'd take just a second to refresh some of my numbers on the bandwidth savings power of bit torrent. Between Prodigem and the old torrentocracy tracker there's been a lot of great public domain content posted and there is no further proof of that then through the willingness of random strangers on the internet to join in and donate their own bandwidth in order to spread and help distribute whatever they see fit. In fact, for the most popular of it all, there simply would have been no way for a single hosting provider to get this stuff out there via more traditional means without some serious $ expenditures. I'd really be interested to see others in the legal torrent hosting circles provide similar information (likely putting these to shame), but without further ado, here are my top 3:

1. Outfoxed (torrent). Robert Greenwald, the producer of the movie Outfoxed agreed to Creative Commons license the interviews from the movie and let me host the content. The interviews run just about 529MB and have been downloaded 2,465 times so far. This represents roughly 1.25 TeraBytes of traffic of which I only personally contributed around 5 GigaBytes (all within the first 2 days of launching the torrent). This ~$4 investment (for the 5GB) represents just 0.3% of the total amount of bandwidth consumed by this torrent. This even got me a mention in Wired magazine.

2. Tsunami Videos (torrent). Worldwide demand for videos of the tsunamis brought down even the largest traditional hosting providers. Prodigem user Chris Holland posted a torrent of some videos he collected (and certainly Prodigem was just a minor provider of tsunami videos via bit torrent), yet there still have been 3603 downloads of the 43MB. This represents about 151 GigaBytes of bandwidth of which Prodigem made up just 1.26 GigaBytes. This represents 0.8% of the total.

3. Uncovered: The War on Iraq (torrent). Again, Robert Greenwald licensed interviews from a movie of his under the Creative Commons. The 644MB of video have been downloaded 608 times. This represents roughly 382 GigaBytes of bandwidth. I only personally provided around 5 GigaBytes of this bandwidth which represents just 1.3% of the total.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:22 PM in torrents | Comments (1)  

Ya know, the BlogTorrent people's Tsunami experiences were compelling and along the lines of your numbers.

I still see Tsunami .torrents crop up on some of the other BT sites...

Being the avenue that you are, I am in fact astounded by your numbers.

How much of that would you attribute to popularity in massively read blogging circles vs. broader, more interconnected social networks? I know I first heard of your content's availability through BoingBoing (I had not yet subscribed to your feed)...

There is a suprising amount of actual, licensed content that pops up on the areas where people are trading unlicensed materials.... you'd be suprised by those numbers, just because they're along-side the illegal stuff.

Posted by: Thomas at February 19, 2005 09:20 AM