| Play from beginning |
| 00:00:00 | Interview with Bram Cohen, developer of BitTorrent |
| 00:00:05 | Well there's is the universe which did happen
and the universe which should have happened, |
| 00:00:10 | and pretty much everyone seems to agree
that in the universe which should have happened, |
| 00:00:21 | BitTorrent was written
by some venture capital backed company |
| 00:00:33 | which then got sued and kinda sort of acquired
after getting sued into oblivion |
| 00:00:42 | and the CEO having a scare of almost having been |
| 00:00:44 | thrown in prison, or actually being thrown in prison. |
| 00:00:48 | Of course in the universe which actually happened, |
| 00:00:53 | - which doesn't really make any sense
so it isn't really worth talking about. |
| 00:00:57 | In the universe which actually happened,
BitTorrent was written by some guy |
| 00:01:03 | in his living room who was living off of credit cards
and became explosively huge, |
| 00:01:10 | prior to taking any investment whatsoever. |
| 00:01:13 | And then the person who wrote it
somehow wound up working with Hollywood. |
| 00:01:22 | And running a very legal business
without any legally scary situations. |
| 00:01:31 | When you have television or radio
and by that I mean television over the airwaves, |
| 00:01:40 | It's kinda like someone is screaming really really loudly
and everyone else can listen. |
| 00:01:46 | And so anyone who wants to can tune in |
| 00:01:49 | Now this is not very efficient from an energy standpoint |
| 00:01:53 | and it involves some very very loud screaming. |
| 00:01:57 | It is highly effective at broadcasting signals to space aliens. |
| 00:02:02 | If there were any aliens hanging out around earth in the 1900s, |
| 00:02:10 | they'd have had a very very easy time watching television. |
| 00:02:13 | And getting a good look at our culture that way, |
| 00:02:16 | because that's where most of the signal was going,
was out into space. |
| 00:02:23 | The internet doesn't work that way - on the internet |
| 00:02:29 | you have all these machines which are connected to the net |
| 00:02:32 | and you can send a message to anyone else on the net, |
| 00:02:37 | but it goes to just them - there's no broadcast concept there. |
| 00:02:42 | So there's this question of how do you make broadcasting work? |
| 00:02:50 | Unfortunately broadcasting can be rather difficult
in that if you have something that's very popular |
| 00:02:58 | and very large and very high quality,
it can become very expensive to distribute it. |
| 00:03:06 | It becomes expensive to be popular.
With broadcast over the airwaves this doesn't happen, |
| 00:03:12 | You're screaming loud enough,
everybody can hear you - not a problem. |
| 00:03:17 | On the internet it's a huge problem so BitTorrent was based |
| 00:03:22 | on this very fundamental calculation of
well if you're sending out something, |
| 00:03:25 | and everyone wants the same thing,
they can just send it to each other, |
| 00:03:30 | So there's this logistical problem of how to make that happen, |
| 00:03:35 | so I figured out how to make it happen. |
| 00:03:37 | Well the basic problem is a pretty simple one, |
| 00:03:41 | there's plenty of upload capacity out there
not being used how do we use it? |
| 00:03:45 | So that's a trivial calculation on its own the problem is, |
| 00:03:52 | these are what you call low quality resources. |
| 00:03:54 | They're peers, they're untrusted,
they are of unknown potential transfer rate |
| 00:04:01 | they're not of terribly good transfer rate to begin with
and they're not very coordinated. |
| 00:04:09 | This isn't really so much of a problem of make something that works, |
| 00:04:13 | so much as make something that works reliably, |
| 00:04:16 | that can handle the fact that peers just sort of disappear
and never come back again. |
| 00:04:22 | When I started working on it there was a bunch of people
working on very much the same thing. |
| 00:04:30 | I decided on an approach that was actually
much, much more ambitious |
| 00:04:35 | than a lot of the things that had been successful
up until that time. |
| 00:04:39 | In that you when you're distributing
something on the internet, |
| 00:04:45 | if you're doing it via HTTP, you kinda don't want everyone |
| 00:04:50 | to come and download the same thing at the same time. |
| 00:04:52 | You want nice small things
that are distributed around when people download them. |
| 00:04:57 | and this is good for making it so
you don't have too much load on the one central server, |
| 00:05:03 | and I went and did this calculation and figured,
well no, I want to do the exact opposite thing. |
| 00:05:10 | I want everyone downloading the same thing at the same time. |
| 00:05:13 | Because if, and this at the time this was a pretty big if,
if you can get a handle |
| 00:05:18 | on all the difficult logistical problems of making it actually happen, |
| 00:05:23 | then you can make it so that the initial place
only has to upload one copy |
| 00:05:30 | of the whole thing and everything else
will be distributed between peers |
| 00:05:35 | and you actually get maximum efficiency
in the very situation you were trying to avoid |
| 00:05:41 | when you were doing everything via HTTP. |
| 00:05:43 | So in that sense I was being rather ambitious
although other people were working on the same problem. |
| 00:05:51 | The difference was in terms of approach,
that I came up with an architecture |
| 00:05:57 | which was designed first
around reliability and efficiency |
| 00:06:02 | - in fact only reliability and efficiency-
it's an utterly bizarre architecture |
| 00:06:09 | unless you consider it
from the point of view of ok... |
| 00:06:12 | first thing,
let's just assume that peers are unreliable |
| 00:06:16 | that we don't know what transfer rates are |
| 00:06:19 | that peers are untrusted and tend to go away |
| 00:06:22 | and then, out of what's left,
how do we make something work |
| 00:06:28 | other people were trying the tree-based architectures,
which proved not to work |
| 00:06:34 | but the reasons why
are very much centered around reliability, |
| 00:06:40 | and are not obvious
unless you've done some networking and know that just... |
| 00:06:44 | peers go away and never come back |
| 00:06:46 | DRM has a lot of political momentum
right now |
| 00:06:50 | it's just like if you're putting content up online
you have to have DRM and... |
| 00:06:57 | whether this is psychological,
whether technicals are saying it, |
| 00:07:03 | whether lawyers are saying it,
whether just collectively everybody feels |
| 00:07:06 | that somebody must be saying it,
so you have to speak in one voice demanding it... |
| 00:07:13 | ... is a little unclear,
and varies from place to place |
| 00:07:17 | When you go to the movie theatre you pay |
| 00:07:19 | when you get a DVD you pay,
when you rent a DVD you pay |
| 00:07:26 | there are a few things going on |
| 00:07:28 | one of the big things is what people associate
with their home experience is watching television |
| 00:07:31 | You turn on the television
and then you watch, |
| 00:07:34 | and people are rather disinclined |
| 00:07:38 | in some ways |
| 00:07:40 | paying for something to watch at home |
| 00:07:42 | they want to just have ads and watch it |
| 00:07:45 | by analogy with television |
| 00:07:48 | another thing that happens is
that people are leery |
| 00:07:50 | frequently leery of paying for anything online |
| 00:07:54 | just putting in a credit card number, |
| 00:07:56 | because credit cards are
so fundamentally insecure |
| 00:07:59 | makes people very nervous,
they don't want to do that, |
| 00:08:02 | and it's an annoying process
entering in your credit card number. |
| 00:08:05 | Now the ridiculous insecurity of credit card numbers
has a lot to do with |
| 00:08:10 | with the ridiculous way banks work
in the United States |
| 00:08:13 | where things are big and bloated
and poorly done technologically |
| 00:08:18 | and there's very little if any incentive to fix it. |
| 00:08:22 | I would say that people are a little used to now, |
| 00:08:26 | when they download videos from the net,
not paying for it, |
| 00:08:31 | it's just what they've been doing, |
| 00:08:33 | the paying for it model just hasn't been there! |
| 00:08:38 | So people just habitually
aren't very used to paying for things. |
| 00:08:44 | At a certain point when you get down
to what's termed level of cost |
| 00:08:49 | the actual price being charged is de minimis, |
| 00:08:54 | whether that's a dollar,
or ten cents or one cent. |
| 00:08:59 | it's a little hard to say. |
| 00:09:03 | But at some point the actual price paid
ceases to be a concern. |
| 00:09:09 | and that's for extremely popular content |
| 00:09:13 | isn't very de minimis |
| 00:09:15 | when you multiply it over
the number of people who are paying it |
| 00:09:22 | that's effectively what advertising online
winds up being |
| 00:09:27 | the monetization on it is small. |
| 00:09:33 | Generally speaking a penny per impression, |
| 00:09:36 | but winds up adding up in the end. |
| 00:09:39 | The question there is
what is the form of that monetization? |
| 00:09:43 | Is it via advertising, which people are
implicitly paying for in some way, |
| 00:09:48 | Is it explicitly paying where
there is this usability issue of making the payment, |
| 00:09:57 | and the concern about fraudulent charges happening
when this payment is happening |
| 00:10:02 | concerns about incentivizing spam,
bladibladibla... |
| 00:10:08 | So at a certain level |
| 00:10:10 | there's the cost of the distribution
and there's the value gotten from the thing |
| 00:10:14 | and if the cost |
| 00:10:16 | is some very small fraction
of the value gotten from the thing |
| 00:10:20 | people cease to pay
any attention to it whatsoever! |
| 00:10:26 | And the question then becomes
what is the form of the payment. |
| 00:10:31 | Advertising is certainly a compelling model |
| 00:10:34 | in that it's very very simple, |
| 00:10:39 | Whenever you have payment
going through a distributor |
| 00:10:43 | there's the whole issue
of making the payment happen |
| 00:10:46 | both in terms of authorizing charges
and redistributing the money |
| 00:10:50 | and it has to somehow
hook into the payment system, |
| 00:10:53 | and advertising is somewhat inefficient |
| 00:10:57 | in that it implicitly hooks into the payment system |
| 00:11:00 | via some complicated route of
people watching the advertising |
| 00:11:03 | doing something eventually,
somewhere out there, |
| 00:11:06 | But it's much much simpler in general, |
| 00:11:09 | a more straightforward way of doing things. |
