Andre Yoskowitz
16 Nov 2013 20:32
BitTorrent, the company that created the P2P protocol, says reports that Netflix is responsible for just about a third of U.S. peak time download traffic is nothing to be proud of, as it is inefficient and hurts ISPs.
Sandvine published the report earlier this year, showing Netflix being responsible for 31 percent of peak download traffic, with YouTube taking another 18 percent. BitTorrent, by comparison, was at just 4 percent. Of course, BitTorrent controlled a much bigger share of upload traffic, due to the fact that all files being downloaded via BitTorrent must be shared by another peer.
"Netflix is hogging all of the bandwidth in North America," BitTorrent's vice president of marketing, Matt Mason (via Guardian). "This is a problem for Netflix. They're talking about [the super-high-definition TV format] 4K, but they're crushing the network already; if they deliver 4K they're going to completely grind it to a halt. All the ISPs are pissed at Netflix, because this is an unsustainable situation.
"It's always been funny to us that Netflix go 'oh, yeah, look, we're beating BitTorrent' – meaning 'we're beating piracy'. They're not beating piracy. It's definitely a good thing that there's a legitimate service that's available, and I'm sure that's helping on some level."
Mason believes the two companies should partner up: "Netflix traffic is hogging the network, [whereas] BitTorrent traffic voluntarily gives way to Skype, Netflix, everything else, because we saw that as the right thing to do. We're being good citizens on the internet. There's so many ways you could do Netflix better using BitTorrent, and the reason they haven't done it is because, in their initial dealings with Hollywood, BitTorrent was the pariah they had to beat. We're the straw-man of the internet."
"If you go on their website right now, in the jobs section, they're hiring a bunch of peer-to-peer engineers. They need BitTorrent, and we'd be happy to work with them, but all this stuff about them beating us is, quite frankly, bullshit. They're not beating us, we're getting out of everybody's way because it's the right thing to do."