RSSLegal P2P Service Close to Launch
By Ed Oswald | Published October 21, 2005, 2:45 PM
Bertelsmann AG, the company that owned the original Napster, is preparing to launch a legal peer-to-peer download service in Germany for music and movies. Called GNAB, the service will debut first in the company's home country and then expand to others throughout 2006.
A company spokesman told the Associated Press Friday that most of the service is complete, and could offer access to 1 million songs at launch. Bertelsmann says the premise behind the P2P-like structure of the service is to prevent overloading of the servers.
Originally reported by BetaNews in March, Bertelsmann subsidiary Arvato is building GNAB - "bang" spelled backward. In order to access songs from the network, a user must first purchase the rights to download much like the traditional services.
Bertelsmann is joining a crowded market where the leader, iTunes, controls about 80 percent of legal downloads, leaving about a half-dozen other competitors with major label contracts to fight over the remaining 20 percent of customers.
iTunes recently added videos to its music store to support the release of its video iPod, including hit shows "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," of which new episodes are made available the day after they air on television for $1.99 USD.
While P2P has come under fire from the record labels, several companies have looked into legitimate uses of the technology in order to save on bandwidth costs. The decentralized nature means less overhead and removes the need to build out an expensive network to handle end-user downloads.
Bertelsmann first joined the P2P race after it bought Napster in 2000. The company attempted to save the file-swapping service from shutting down entirely after repeated lawsuits from the Recording Industry Association of America, but eventually sold the Napster brand to Roxio.
"...several companies have looked into legitimate uses of the technology in order to save on bandwidth costs. The decentralized nature means less overhead and removes the need to build out an expensive network to handle end-user downloads."
If they rely on the bandwidth of the users download speeds will be extremely slow, like on Kazaa or Morpheus. Even with a high speed connection, because unfortunately not everyone has broadband or a decent upload speed.
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|Very true, the only high speed I would be able to get where I am is DSl and i hasn't made it out this far so the only other broadband option I have is Direcway. now the advertise down speed of up to 500k but the but the highest i've seen is 200k and the advertised up speed is up to 50k haven't ever checked to see what i actually get though. But yet the only broadband option open around here is direcway ($59.95 a month), other than that it's Dialup......horrible dialup, never going back to that.
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|Bit Torrent is faster then HTTP
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|"Arvato is building GNAB - "bang" spelled backwards."
hahaha. well that was a nice piece of information.
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|Notice the lack of information about any DRM...
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|If you have to pay, it will obviously have DRM. Question is whether it will use something new or Windows Media like everyone else (aside from Apple).
The thing that's ridiculous though, is assuming that consumers will buy music AND be willing to let people use their upstream bandwidth. If people are paying for something, why would they give up their upstream network, which is already limited?
Can you imagine Apple requiring all iTunes customers to open a port on their router and share out the music they downloaded so Apple can save money on bandwidth bills?
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|Unless you save money using their service. If you paid $.69 or $.79 per song instead of $.99, would you then be willing to share bandwidth?
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|Depends. If I would only have to share while I was downloading, sure. But that's not really workable, since on a fast connection downloads take less than a couple minutes.
If I had to have sharing on 24/7 as part of using the service, no discount would be acceptable. If I just need to share for, let's say, 1 hour of the day and I could limit the upstream so it didn't clog up my entire connection - it could be acceptable.
Still, songs from Yahoo Music are only 79-cents and I don't need to use up my connection for that. So, unless the songs were really cheap from GNAB, I'm not sure how accepting consumers will be.
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|Didn't even think of that, but wouldn't touch it with a 10 ft. pole. [cue pole jokes in 5...4...3..]
Bandwidth is a precious commodity, especially upstream. No-one gives it away... even on P2P. The *only* reason P2P works at all is up/down ratios except in some very rare cases.
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|Agreed, that is what the torrent community is based off of. You'd be surprised how many seeders you see for a popular linux distro like suse 10.0, people are very generous when it comes to certain things. I can imagine if the service can generate enough interest for the user to actually leave his stuff shared, this could be a very nice service
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|If I'm paying for a song, I'm **NOT** sharing bandwidth.
Period.
They want to have their cake and eat it too?
Sod Off!!
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|Obviously there has to be some incentive for a user to sacrifice their upload bw, maybe there would be discounts proportional to the total uploaded data over a period.
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