TEQs: Vudu & Bittorrent- what are they?

Vudu

Would you buy VUDU, I guess you would if you are a movie lover. For Nepal it does not look too practical, because 5000 is too liitle, it needs movies from all the countries in the world, and there should be need for internet. Unlike USA and Europe and most other countries, fast internet is very expensive in Nepal.and most homes have no computers. Now you can check this article if you still want Vudu.

Want a collection of 5,000 movies that you can start watching immediately, at the press of a button? The Vudu set-top box just might be the answer, and it'll arrive on store shelves in a matter of weeks.I blogged about Vudu back in April; now that we're closer to the launch date, more details have emerged, and David Pogue of the New York Times even has a hands-on review.

According to Pogue, the $400 set-top box boasts impressive, DVD-level quality (competitors such as Apple TV and the Xbox Video Marketplace suffer from sub-DVD image quality with their standard-def offerings), an easy-to-use remote, an Ethernet port (no need for a PC), and a 250GB hard drive, capable of storing 100 full movies. Videos start the moment you click "play"—that's because the Vudu stores the first 30 seconds of all available movies locally, and downloads chunks of movies from other Vudu users (see my original post for more details).

While the $400 price tag is a bit pricey, there's no monthly subscription fee; you can rent movies for $2 to $4 (with a 24-hour viewing window) or buy videos for $15 to $20. Sounds cool, but of course, the Vudu will live and die according to its selection of movies, which (according to Pogue, at least) is a bit spotty. Sure, plenty of hits are available, including "300" and "Blades of Glory," but some recent titles, such as "The Departed," are missing, and there are plenty of Z-grade stinkers. That said, Vudu execs say they hope to have more than 10,000 titles, including HD movies, available in the coming months.

Pirates Join Business

BitTorrent, a company whose name has long meant digital piracy to content owners, now wants to be the online media industry's humble servant. On Tuesday, the company debuted tools on the video service, Brightcove, that spread the work of delivering video files among many users' computers at once, a process designed to make streaming video faster, cheaper and more reliable.

BitTorrent's content delivery system, originally developed as an open-source product, uses a "peer-to-peer" downloading method that can piece together a file from several servers at once, as well as from the hard drive of every user who has previously downloaded the file, taking the bandwidth burden off any single source. That's made the technology a hit with illegal downloaders, who pirate copyrighted files and share them in online communities.

But since February, BitTorrent has taken a less controversial approach, partnering with media companies including Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros. and MGM to legally distribute video content using the same technology. Now BitTorrent says that its new service, which it calls its Delivery Network Accelerator, or DNA, will let users begin viewing video midway through the download, making it seem like instantaneous playback. The company claims that DNA will serve up video 10 to 50% faster than any other content delivery system.

"When you're streaming video to PCs from a single source, the users aren't fully saturating their available bandwidth," says Adam Berrey, vice president of marketing for Brightcove, which is the first video service to use BitTorrent's DNA. Because BitTorrent pulls the video from many different sources at once, Berrey says, its delivery should be far more efficient than pulling from a single server. Even better: Delivery should speed up and get cheaper as more users come online to watch videos, instead of bogging down as traditional downloading does.

"It's going to be a very significant shift," contends Berrey. " We've seen an explosive growth in short-form video clips, and this will allow longer format files as well. It's definitely a significant step in the evolution of Internet TV."

Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent's co-founder and president, claims that the efficiency of peer-to-peer delivery will finally make online video profitable. To keep videos streaming on demand without annoying delays, most video sites use expensive content delivery networks like Akamai and Limelight, and sites like YouTube--as well as clones launched by practically every television network--have struggled to find an advertising model that produces enough revenue to offset those ballooning bandwidth costs. Peer-to-peer delivery, Navin argues, is the solution.

There are skeptics. Aram Sinnreich, a media industry analyst with Radar Research, argues that BitTorrent's technology is more of an incremental step towards profitable online television. "Peer-to-peer isn't the savior of the online video industry," Sinnreich says. "But it is an intelligent solution for faster, more efficient rich media, a very real and useful technology."

BitTorrent's challenge, Sinnreich says, is overcoming the bad-boy reputation it earned by becoming the technology of choice for online music and video pirates. But the company's recent deals with major media companies, as well as its new partnership with Brightcove, signal that it wants to go legit--and make money.

"A year ago, no media network in the world would have been willing to let BitTorrent distribute its content to millions of consumers for free," Sinnreich says. "Now they're seeing that BitTorrent can save them money and distribute their content through legitimate channels. That has the potential to be very successful."

Pirates don't just plunder. In Sweden, it seems, they also believe in sharing.
As the world's largest repository of BitTorrent files, ThePirateBay.org helps millions of users around the world share copyrighted movies, music and other files--without paying for them.
That's illegal, of course--at least it is in the U.S. But when Time Warner's (nyse: TWX - news - people ) Warner Bros. studio accused them of breaking U.S. copyright law in 2005, the pirates gleefully reminded the movie company that they didn't live in America, but rather in "the land of vikings, reindeer, Aurora Borealis and cute blond girls."
Based in Stockholm, The Pirate Bay serves as a massive worldwide hub for copyright infringement but is shielded by its home country's lax copyright laws. The site lives in a comfortable legal loophole, one of many available to Web sites that offer users copyrighted content. Some exploit vagaries in U.S. law, while others depend on their international immunity.

That rankles big media outfits like Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ), General Electric (nyse: GE - news - people )-owned NBC, News Corp. (nyse: NWS - news - people ) and Viacom (nyse: VIA.B - news - people ) as they vie to hang on to their sales and carve out a slice of the Web's growing audience--hence Viacom's ongoing $1 billion suit against Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) YouTube. But no matter the outcome of that trial, sites like The Pirate Bay show that the Web will always offer safe harbors for clever copyright violators.

Take the growing guerrilla army of YouTube clones. Video sites like DailyMotion, Veoh, GoFish (otcbb: GOFH.OB - news - people ), OuOu, Peekvid, LiveDigital and 1Dawg work on the same model as YouTube, allowing any user to upload content. But they don't suffer from as much legal scrutiny as better-known video sites, nor do they limit the length of clips uploaded by users.

That means practically any television show or movie can be dug up on one of these YouTube imitators, and another subindustry of Web portals has sprouted just for that purpose. Sites like Alluc.org, VideoHybrid.com, Peekvid.com, TVlinks.co.uk and YouTVPC.com all collect and organize links to movies and shows on these second-tier video sites, offering streaming, on-demand video copyright infringement.

These two classes of video sites--one that lets users upload videos and another that links them to movies and shows located elsewhere--work together in a careful symbiosis. Alluc.org, for instance, links to Lost episodes on Veoh, Scrubs episodes on LiveDigital and kung-fu movies on DailyMotion, bringing in about 500,000 unique visitors a day. The site’s creators, three teenagers living in a suburb of Hamburg, Germany, say they're making plenty of money, though they won't say how much. They also say they're not breaking any copyright laws, since they merely link to content instead of hosting it on their own site.

Their argument is rooted, ironically, in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that U.S. lawmakers approved in 1998. The Alluc.org kids, as well as the operators of most sites that let users upload content, argue that they're not violating copyright law if they're not the ones putting it up and if they take it down at the copyright holder's request. It's the same argument Google is making in its YouTube case.

But there are more practical reasons that sites like Alluc.org get away with what they're doing. One is that there are simply too many of them to keep track of. Media companies' lawyers rarely have time to police so many obscure sites, and even when they do, users can always upload the infringing files again. So the flow of copyrighted streaming video continues.

Not every scheme to evade intellectual property laws is so subtle. The music-selling site AllofMP3.com uses a simpler business model: Base your company in Russia, steal music from American labels and sell it cheaply. AllofMP3 allows users to download full albums for as little as $1 each--10% of what they would cost on iTunes. From June to October 2006 alone, the Recording Industry Association of America says that 11 million songs were downloaded from the site. AllofMP3 claims those sales adhered strictly to Russian law, but that doesn’t satisfy the RIAA; the record labels have launched a lawsuit, asking for $150,000 for each stolen file, totaling $1.65 trillion.

As Russia seeks to join the World Trade Organization, it may be forced to step in line with international copyright licensing and stamp out sites like AllofMP3. But there's still hope for international pirates: Despite Sweden's membership in the WTO since 1995, The Pirate Bay's copyright sabotage campaign is alive and well. Though Swedish police raided the site's headquarters and confiscated its servers in May of last year, the site was soon back online, running on donated hardware. Since then, Pirate Bay administrator Peter Sunde says, the site has started distributing its servers and bandwidth to other locations to avoid the possibility of another raid.

Sunde claims even he doesn't know exactly where the servers are stashed.

Still, Sunde and his partners in piracy are waiting for the Swedish government to press charges. If they are prosecuted, Sunde suspects it will most likely be in the next month, before the servers confiscated from their headquarters last year become inadmissible as evidence. But he isn’t worried. "If the Swedish government presses charges, they’ll lose. If they don’t, the U.S. government will be mad at them," Sunde says. "They’re in quite a pickle."

So, he might have added, are the world’s copyright holders.