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116-535: VidZone was one of the largest online music video VOD services in the world, operated by London-based company VidZone Digital Media and Sony Computer Entertainment . The online service provides free streaming of music videos from the VidZone.tv website, in addition to music distribution through a number of mobile networks worldwide. The VidZone catalogue encompasses over 1.5 million tracks, 45,000 music videos and 15,000 realtones, including full access to catalogues from

232-494: A DEC Alpha –based computer for its VOD servers, allowing it to support more than a million users. By 1994 the Oracle scalable VOD system used massively parallel processors to support from 500 to 30,000 users. The SGI system supported 4,000 users. The servers connected to networks of increasing size to eventually support video stream delivery to entire cities. In the UK, from September 1994,

348-563: A subscription model that requires users to pay a monthly fee for access to a selection of movies, television shows, and original series. In contrast, YouTube , another Internet-based VOD system, uses an advertising-funded model in which users can access most of its video content free of charge but must pay a subscription fee for premium content. Some airlines offer VOD services as in-flight entertainment to passengers through video screens embedded in seats or externally provided portable media players. Downloading and streaming VOD systems provide

464-575: A subscription business model in which subscribers are charged a regular fee to access unlimited programs. Examples of these services include Netflix , Hulu , Amazon Prime Video , Max , Disney+ , Peacock , Paramount+ , Apple TV+ , Disney+ Hotstar , iQIYI , Star+ , Hayu , BET+ , Discovery+ , Crunchyroll , SonyLIV , ZEE5 , and GulliMax . Near video on demand (NVOD) is a pay-per-view consumer video technique used by multi-channel broadcasters using high-bandwidth distribution mechanisms such as satellite and cable television. Multiple copies of

580-531: A 20-year deal to stream movies on demand over Enron's fiber-optic network. The heavily promoted deal failed, with Enron's share prices dropping following the announcement. In 1998, Kingston Communications became the first UK company to launch a fully commercial VOD service and the first to integrate broadcast television and Internet access through a single set-top box using IP delivery over ADSL. By 2001, Kingston Interactive TV had attracted 15,000 subscribers. After several trials, Home Choice followed in 1999 but

696-713: A DVR rented or purchased from the provider, or to a PC or to a portable device for deferred viewing. Streaming media has emerged as an increasingly popular medium of VOD provision over downloading, including BitTorrent . Desktop client applications such as the Apple iTunes online content store and Smart TV apps such as Amazon Prime Video allow temporary rentals and purchases of video entertainment content. Other Internet-based VOD systems provide users with access to bundles of video entertainment content rather than individual movies and shows. The most common of these systems, Netflix , Hulu , Disney+ , Peacock , Max and Paramount+ , use

812-619: A VOD service formed a major part of the Cambridge Digital Interactive Television Trial. This provided video and data to 250 homes and several schools connected to the Cambridge Cable network, later part of NTL, now Virgin Media . The MPEG-1 encoded video was streamed over an ATM network from an ICL media server to set-top boxes designed by Acorn Online Media. The trial commenced at a speed of 2 Mbit/s to

928-541: A chance to join the swarm. Although "swarming" scales well to tolerate "flash crowds" for popular content, it is less useful for unpopular or niche market content. Peers arriving after the initial rush might find the content unavailable and need to wait for the arrival of a "seed" in order to complete their downloads. The seed arrival, in turn, may take long to happen (this is termed the "seeder promotion problem"). Since maintaining seeds for unpopular content entails high bandwidth and administrative costs, this runs counter to

1044-498: A copper telephone cable to provide a VOD service of acceptable quality as the required bandwidth of a digital television signal is around 200   Mbps , which is 2,000 times greater than the bandwidth of a speech signal over a copper telephone wire. VOD services were only made possible as a result of two major technological developments: MPEG ( motion-compensated DCT ) video compression and asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) data transmission. Plans such as those of

1160-421: A cost: downloads can take time to rise to full speed because it may take time for enough peer connections to be established, and it may take time for a node to receive sufficient data to become an effective uploader. This contrasts with regular downloads (such as from an HTTP server, for example) that, while more vulnerable to overload and abuse, rise to full speed very quickly, and maintain this speed throughout. In

1276-454: A data file treats the file as a number of identically sized pieces, usually with byte sizes of a power of 2, and typically between 32 KB and 16 MB each. The peer creates a hash for each piece, using the SHA-1 hash function, and records it in the torrent file. Pieces with sizes greater than 512 KB will reduce the size of a torrent file for a very large payload, but is claimed to reduce

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1392-399: A decentralized network of nodes that route traffic to dynamic trackers. Most BitTorrent clients also use peer exchange (PEX) to gather peers in addition to trackers and DHT . Peer exchange checks with known peers to see if they know of any other peers. With the 3.0.5.0 release of Vuze, all major BitTorrent clients now have compatible peer exchange. Web "seeding" was implemented in 2006 as

1508-595: A draft on their website) that is incompatible with that of Azureus. In 2014, measurement showed concurrent users of Mainline DHT to be from 10 million to 25 million, with a daily churn of at least 10 million. Current versions of the official BitTorrent client, μTorrent , BitComet , Transmission and BitSpirit all share compatibility with Mainline DHT. Both DHT implementations are based on Kademlia . As of version 3.0.5.0, Azureus also supports Mainline DHT in addition to its own distributed database through use of an optional application plugin. This potentially allows

1624-547: A few months. PVOD made a return during the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting global closures of cinemas . Certain films that had already been released including The Invisible Man were quickly also released on VOD platforms for a higher rental price than usual, while other films including Trolls World Tour were released simultaneously on PVOD and in drive-in theaters , or in some cases directly to PVOD only. In most cases, these PVOD releases are offered through most of

1740-455: A good connection between them do not exchange data simply because neither of them takes the initiative. To counter these effects, the official BitTorrent client program uses a mechanism called "optimistic unchoking", whereby the client reserves a portion of its available bandwidth for sending pieces to random peers (not necessarily known good partners, or "preferred peers") in hopes of discovering even better partners and to ensure that newcomers get

1856-576: A hybrid mode to ensure support for legacy clients. The BitTorrent protocol can be used to reduce the server and network impact of distributing large files. Rather than downloading a file from a single source server, the BitTorrent protocol allows users to join a "swarm" of hosts to upload and download from each other simultaneously. The protocol is an alternative to the older single source, multiple mirror sources technique for distributing data, and can work effectively over networks with lower bandwidth . Using

1972-419: A hybrid mode where the torrents are hashed through both the new method and the old method, with the intent that the files will be shared with peers on both v1 and v2 swarms. Another update to the specification is adding a hash tree to speed up time from adding a torrent to downloading files, and to allow more granular checks for file corruption. In addition, each file is now hashed individually, enabling files in

2088-465: A later date, without the loss of previously downloaded information, which in turn makes BitTorrent particularly useful in the transfer of larger files. This also enables the client to seek out readily available pieces and download them immediately, rather than halting the download and waiting for the next (and possibly unavailable) piece in line, which typically reduces the overall time of the download. This eventual transition from peers to seeders determines

2204-456: A legal peer-to-peer approach based on Kontiki technology to provide very-high-capacity multi-point downloads of the video content. Instead of the video content all being downloaded from Sky's servers, the content comes from multiple users of the system who have already downloaded the content. Other UK television broadcasters implemented their own versions of the same technology, such as Channel 4 's 4oD (4 on Demand, now known as All 4 ) which

2320-407: A list of all the torrents shared by the peers it connected to in the current session (or it can even maintain the list between sessions if instructed). At any time the user can search into that Torrent Collection list for a certain torrent and sort the list by categories. When the user chooses to download a torrent from that list, the .torrent file is automatically searched for (by info-hash value) in

2436-483: A list of files available for transfer and allow the client to find peer users, known as "seeds", who may transfer the files. BitTorrent downloading is considered to be faster than HTTP ("direct downloading") and FTP due to the lack of a central server that could limit bandwidth. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files, such as digital video files containing TV shows and video clips, or digital audio files. BitTorrent accounted for

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2552-439: A network, a BitTorrent download differs from a one way server-client download (as is typical with an HTTP or FTP request, for example) in several fundamental ways: Taken together, these differences allow BitTorrent to achieve much lower cost to the content provider, much higher redundancy, and much greater resistance to abuse or to " flash crowds " than regular server software . However, this protection, theoretically, comes at

2668-487: A new "Zones" functionality, whereby users select a "Zone" for the genre of music they wish to listen to, in order to quickly find all music of that type. This includes the "MyZone" section, where users save playlists. A new recommendation engine was also added, as well as social integration with Facebook and PSN as a whole. On 27 August 2014, Samsung announced that the VidZone service had launched on Samsung smartphones, tablets, and Smart TVs (2013 models onwards). Available via

2784-725: A piece of content once purchased via the Internet; and download to rent (DTR), by which customers can access the content for a limited time upon renting. Examples of TVOD services include the Apple iTunes Store and the Google Play Store, as well as VOD rental services offered through multichannel television (i.e., cable or satellite) providers. Premium video on demand (PVOD) is a version of TVOD which allows customers to access video-on-demand content several weeks or months earlier than their customary TVOD or home video availability – often feature films made available alongside, or in place of,

2900-415: A programme are broadcast at short time intervals (typically staggered on a schedule of every 10–20 minutes) on linear channels providing convenience for viewers, who can watch the programme without needing to tune in at the only scheduled point in time. A viewer may only have to wait a few minutes before the next time a movie will be programmed. This form is bandwidth-intensive, reduces the number of channels

3016-638: A provider can offer, and is generally provided by large operators with a great deal of redundant capacity. This concept has been reduced in popularity as video on demand is implemented, along with providers often wanting to provide the maximum throughput for their broadband services possible. Only the satellite services DirecTV and Dish Network continue to provide NVOD services, as they do not offer broadband and much of their rural customer base only has access to slower dial-up and non- 5G wireless and satellite internet options which cannot stream films or have onerous data caps (and where possible, AT&T

3132-414: A set-top box with a one-terabyte hard drive that could be used for video-on-demand services previously offered through cable television and broadband. A movie, for example, could be sent out once using a broadcast signal rather than numerous times over cable or fiber-optic lines, and this would not involve the expense of adding many miles of lines. Sezmi planned to lease part of the broadcast spectrum to offer

3248-430: A significant reduction in the original distributor's hardware and bandwidth resource costs. Distributed downloading protocols in general provide redundancy against system problems, reduce dependence on the original distributor, and provide sources for the file which are generally transient and therefore there is no single point of failure as in one way server-client transfers. Though both ultimately transfer files over

3364-545: A slightly different approach is provided by the BitComet client through its "Torrent Exchange" feature. Whenever two peers using BitComet (with Torrent Exchange enabled) connect to each other they exchange lists of all the torrents (name and info-hash) they have in the Torrent Share storage (torrent files which were previously downloaded and for which the user chose to enable sharing by Torrent Exchange). Thus each client builds up

3480-433: A subscription service that National Association of Broadcasters President Gordon H. Smith said would provide a superior picture to that of cable or satellite at a lower cost. Developing VOD requires extensive negotiations to identify a financial model that would serve both content creators and cable providers while providing desirable content for viewers at an acceptable price point. Key factors identified for determining

3596-856: A subscription to the Disney+ streaming service, but they then retain access as long as they maintain their subscription (for Mulan , this was effectively a 90-day rental, as the film became available to all Disney+ subscribers at no extra charge in December). It has been reported that the pandemic had contributed to a transformation in movie distribution in favor of PVOD over traditional movie houses, as studios were able to realize 80% of revenue through PVOD versus 50% of traditional theater box office receipts. Theater owners including AMC and Cinemark, as well as suppliers including IMAX and National CineMedia, all experienced significant drops in revenues during shutdowns related to COVID-19. Subscription VOD ( SVOD ) services use

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3712-406: A system is no longer downloading but only uploading data, and terminate its connection by injecting TCP RST (reset flag) packets. Another unofficial feature is an extension to the BitTorrent metadata format proposed by John Hoffman and implemented by several indexing websites. It allows the use of multiple trackers per file, so if one tracker fails, others can continue to support file transfer. It

3828-475: A system of digital video recorders to simulate the video-on-demand experience. Most of Edge Spectrum's channels, where they are on air, carry televangelism . Push video on demand is so-named because the provider "pushes" the content out to the viewer's set-top box without the viewer having requested the content. This technique is used by several broadcasters on systems that lack the connectivity and bandwidth to provide true "streaming" video on demand. Push VOD

3944-426: A third of all internet traffic in 2004, according to a study by Cachelogic. As recently as 2019 BitTorrent remained a significant file sharing protocol according to Sandvine , generating a substantial amount of Internet traffic, with 2.46% of downstream , and 27.58% of upstream traffic, although this share has declined significantly since then. Programmer Bram Cohen , a University at Buffalo alumnus, designed

4060-462: A torrent file could be hosted on one site and tracked by another unrelated site. Private sites operate like public ones except that they may restrict access to registered users and may also keep track of the amount of data each user uploads and downloads, in an attempt to reduce " leeching ". Web search engines allow the discovery of torrent files that are hosted and tracked on other sites; examples include The Pirate Bay and BTDigg . These sites allow

4176-482: A torrent index site. The first uploader acted as a seed , and downloaders would initially connect as peers . Those who wish to download the file would download the torrent, which their client would use to connect to a tracker which had a list of the IP addresses of other seeds and peers in the swarm. Once a peer completed a download of the complete file, it could in turn function as a seed. These files contain metadata about

4292-499: A tracker. Azureus was the first BitTorrent client to implement such a system through the distributed hash table (DHT) method. An alternative and incompatible DHT system, known as Mainline DHT , was released in the Mainline BitTorrent client three weeks later (though it had been in development since 2002) and subsequently adopted by the μTorrent , Transmission , rTorrent , KTorrent , BitComet , and Deluge clients. After

4408-470: A traditional set-top box or through remote devices such as computers, tablets, and smartphones. VOD users may also permanently download content to a device such as a computer, digital video recorder (DVR) or, a portable media player for continued viewing. The majority of cable and telephone company –based television providers offer VOD streaming, whereby a user selects a video programme that begins to play immediately (i.e., streaming), or downloading to

4524-411: A traditional release in movie theaters – but at a much higher price point. A version of the model was tested in 2011 by American satellite TV provider DirecTV under the brand name "Home Premiere", which allowed viewers to rent select films from major studios for US$ 30 per rental as soon as 60 days after they debuted in cinemas, compared to 120 days for the regular TVOD window; this version only lasted

4640-493: A user to view content. This technology also provides an advantage for technology companies for data analysis of viewed content from consumers. By analyzing data of what is viewed most by consumers, companies can purchase more content that is aimed for an audience, and then in-turn market products that are based on what viewer profiles are of a group of consumers who viewer a specific amount of content. This data analysis will often provide researchers valuable data that includes: what

4756-441: A web publisher as creating a direct HTTP download. In addition, it would allow the "web seed" to be disabled if the swarm becomes too popular while still allowing the file to be readily available. This feature has two distinct specifications, both of which are supported by Libtorrent and the 26+ clients that use it. The first was created by John "TheSHAD0W" Hoffman, who created BitTornado. This first specification requires running

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4872-399: A web service that serves content by info-hash and piece number, rather than filename. The other specification is created by GetRight authors and can rely on a basic HTTP download space (using byte serving ). In September 2010, a new service named Burnbit was launched which generates a torrent from any URL using webseeding. There are server-side solutions that provide initial seeding of

4988-565: Is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a decentralized manner. The protocol is developed and maintained by Rainberry, Inc. , and was first released in 2001. To send or receive files, users use a BitTorrent client on their Internet-connected computer, which are available for a variety of computing platforms and operating systems , including an official client . BitTorrent trackers provide

5104-672: Is a cable VOD service that also offers pay-per-view. Once the programs have been downloaded onto a user's PVR, he or she can watch, play, pause, and seek at their convenience. VOD is also common in expensive hotels. According to the European Audiovisual Observatory , 142 paying VOD services were operational in Europe at the end of 2006. The number increased to 650 by 2009. At the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada , Sezmi CEO Buno Pati and president Phil Wiser showed

5220-603: Is a device that is Internet capable. Cable media companies have combined VOD with live streaming services. The early-2020s launches of apps from cable companies (e.g., NBC 's Peacock , CBS 's Paramount+ ) are attempts to compete with Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) services because they lack live news and sports content. Streaming video servers can serve a wide community via a WAN , but responsiveness may be reduced. Download VOD services are practical in homes equipped with cable modems or DSL connections. Servers for traditional cable and telco VOD services are usually placed at

5336-435: Is also used by broadcasters that want to optimize their video streaming infrastructures by pre-loading the most popular contents to the consumers' set-top device. If the consumer requests one of these films, it is already loaded on her or his DVR. A push VOD system uses a personal video recorder (PVR) to store a selection of content, often transmitted in spare capacity overnight or all day long at low bandwidth. Users can watch

5452-999: Is developing a similar torrent API that will provide the same features, and help bring the torrent community to Web 2.0 standards. Alongside this release is a first PHP application built using the API called PEP, which will parse any Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) feed and automatically create and seed a torrent for each enclosure found in that feed. Since BitTorrent makes up a large proportion of total traffic, some ISPs have chosen to "throttle" (slow down) BitTorrent transfers. For this reason, methods have been developed to disguise BitTorrent traffic in an attempt to thwart these efforts. Protocol header encrypt (PHE) and Message stream encryption/Protocol encryption (MSE/PE) are features of some BitTorrent clients that attempt to make BitTorrent hard to detect and throttle. As of November 2015, Vuze , BitComet , KTorrent , Transmission , Deluge , μTorrent , MooPolice, Halite, qBittorrent , rTorrent , and

5568-478: Is divided into segments called pieces . As each peer receives a new piece of the file, it becomes a source (of that piece) for other peers, relieving the original seed from having to send that piece to every computer or user wishing a copy. With BitTorrent, the task of distributing the file is shared by those who want it; it is entirely possible for the seed to send only a single copy of the file itself and eventually distribute to an unlimited number of peers. Each piece

5684-409: Is implemented in several clients, such as BitComet , BitTornado, BitTorrent, KTorrent , Transmission , Deluge , μTorrent , rtorrent , Vuze , and Frostwire . Trackers are placed in groups, or tiers, with a tracker randomly chosen from the top tier and tried, moving to the next tier if all the trackers in the top tier fail. Torrents with multiple trackers can decrease the time it takes to download

5800-579: Is now prioritizing their streaming service AT&T TV , which utilizes a fully immediate VOD experience, over DirecTV ). Before the rise of VOD, the cable pay-per-view provider In Demand provided up to 40 channels in 2002, with several films receiving four channels on a staggered schedule to provide the NVOD experience for viewers. As of 2018, most cable pay-per-view channels now number mainly 3–5, and are used mainly for live ring sports events (boxing and professional wrestling), comedy specials, and concerts, though

5916-464: Is protected by a cryptographic hash contained in the torrent descriptor. This ensures that any modification of the piece can be reliably detected, and thus prevents both accidental and malicious modifications of any of the pieces received at other nodes. If a node starts with an authentic copy of the torrent descriptor, it can verify the authenticity of the entire file it receives. Pieces are typically downloaded non-sequentially, and are rearranged into

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6032-509: The DHT Network and when found it is downloaded by the querying client which can subsequently create and initiate a downloading task. Users find a torrent of interest on a torrent index site or by using a search engine built into the client, download it, and open it with a BitTorrent client. The client connects to the tracker(s) or seeds specified in the torrent file, from which it receives a list of seeds and peers currently transferring pieces of

6148-684: The Digital Cinema Initiative , in 2002. The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 planned to launch a joint platform provisionally called Kangaroo in 2008. This was abandoned in 2009 following complaints, which were investigated by the Competition Commission . In that same year, the assets of the now-defunct Kangaroo project were acquired by Arqiva , who used the technology to launch the SeeSaw service in February 2010. A year later, however, SeeSaw

6264-504: The Laservision media format and featured a jukebox -like media handling system involving players served by disc carousels, with twelve such handler units capable of serving up to 6,000 customers. Other early VOD systems used tapes as the real-time source of video streams. GTE started as a trial in 1990, with AT&T providing all components. By 1992, VOD servers were supplying previously encoded digital video from disks and DRAM . In

6380-490: The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus , Amazon Freevee , Popcornflix , Crackle , Tubi , Movies Anywhere , Vudu , Dailymotion , and YouTube . Walmart is adding ASVOD original programming to Vudu, and YouTube Originals will be ASVOD by 2020. Data analysis When technology companies, include SVOD apps on their devices, like phones, tablets, televisions, game systems, computers, this can remove an attitude obstruction for

6496-492: The internet service provider of users participating in the swarms of files that are under copyright. In some jurisdictions, copyright holders may launch lawsuits against uploaders or downloaders for infringement, and police may arrest suspects in such cases. Various means have been used to promote anonymity. For example, the BitTorrent client Tribler makes available a Tor -like onion network , optionally routing transfers through other peers to obscure which client has requested

6612-501: The Azureus/Vuze client to reach a bigger swarm. Another idea that has surfaced in Vuze is that of virtual torrents . This idea is based on the distributed tracker approach and is used to describe some web resource. Currently, it is used for instant messaging . It is implemented using a special messaging protocol and requires an appropriate plugin. Anatomic P2P is another approach, which uses

6728-403: The BitTorrent protocol, several basic computers, such as home computers, can replace large servers while efficiently distributing files to many recipients. This lower bandwidth usage also helps prevent large spikes in internet traffic in a given area, keeping internet speeds higher for all users in general, regardless of whether or not they use the BitTorrent protocol. The file being distributed

6844-404: The BitTorrent v2 protocol specification. BitTorrent v2 is intended to work seamlessly with previous versions of the BitTorrent protocol. The main reason for the update was that the old cryptographic hash function , SHA-1 , is no longer considered safe from malicious attacks by the developers, and as such, v2 uses SHA-256 . To ensure backwards compatibility, the v2 .torrent file format supports

6960-519: The DHT was adopted, a "private" flag – analogous to the broadcast flag  – was unofficially introduced, telling clients to restrict the use of decentralized tracking regardless of the user's desires. The flag is intentionally placed in the info section of the torrent so that it cannot be disabled or removed without changing the identity of the torrent. The purpose of this DRM is to prevent torrents from being shared with clients that do not have access to

7076-600: The Integrated Network System, a national high-capacity fibre-optic network supporting a range of broadband services in Japan, noted in a more general 1986 publication, were interpreted as conducive to eventual VOD deployment. However, early VOD trials employed existing cable television infrastructure, notably British Telecom's video library trial, operated through the Westminster Cable Company. This trial used

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7192-750: The Samsung/Galaxy Apps and Google Play Store, the ad-funded service is free to Samsung users, with no in-app purchases. Content from the VidZone app can be streamed to Samsung Smart TVs (2014 models onwards) using multi-screen technology and also supports Google Chromecast allowing users to watch playlists and videos on the big screen. The service initially launched in UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. On 3 November, VidZone launched in an additional 11 territories including Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Portugal, Austria, Luxembourg and Switzerland. Video on demand Television VOD systems can stream content, either through

7308-644: The US, the 1982 anti-trust break-up of AT&T resulted in several smaller telephone companies nicknamed Baby Bells . Following this, the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 prohibited telephone companies from providing video services within their operating regions. In 1993, the National Communication and Information Infrastructure (NII) was proposed and passed by the US House and Senate, opening

7424-571: The United States on 16 July 2013. Initially, the music videos were from artists signed either on Sony Music or the Universal Music Group . On 16 August 2010, VidZone announced they now have a licensing agreement with the former EMI Music company. On 20 June 2013, Warner Music music videos were added to the service, meaning that VidZone has music videos from all three of the major music record labels. There are currently over 85,000 videos on

7540-672: The Universal Music Group, Warner Music, Sony Music and EMI . VidZone's service was extended to the PlayStation 3 video game system in some PAL territories (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia and Ireland) on 11 June 2009, allowing users to watch music videos on their PS3 or streamed to their PSP via Remote Play . The service was expanded by 11 countries: Belgium, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland, Portugal and New Zealand, during November and December 2009. The service launched in

7656-468: The ability of BitTorrent clients to download torrent pieces from an HTTP source in addition to the "swarm". The advantage of this feature is that a website may distribute a torrent for a particular file or batch of files and make those files available for download from that same web server; this can simplify long-term seeding and load balancing through the use of existing, cheap, web hosting setups. In theory, this would make using BitTorrent almost as easy for

7772-679: The authorization of copyright holders, rendering those sites especially vulnerable to lawsuits. A BitTorrent index is a "list of .torrent files , which typically includes descriptions" and information about the torrent's content. Several types of websites support the discovery and distribution of data on the BitTorrent network. Public torrent-hosting sites such as The Pirate Bay allow users to search and download from their collection of torrent files. Users can typically also upload torrent files for content they wish to distribute. Often, these sites also run BitTorrent trackers for their hosted torrent files, but these two functions are not mutually dependent:

7888-461: The beginning, BitTorrent's non-contiguous download methods made it harder to support "streaming playback". In 2014, the client Popcorn Time allowed for streaming of BitTorrent video files. Since then, more and more clients are offering streaming options. The BitTorrent protocol provides no way to index torrent files. As a result, a comparatively small number of websites have hosted a large majority of torrents, many linking to copyrighted works without

8004-400: The cable head-end, serving a particular market, and cable hubs in larger markets. In the telco world, they are placed in either the central office or a newly created location called a Video Head-End Office (VHO). VOD services first appeared in the early 1990s. Until then, it was not thought possible that a television programme could be squeezed into the limited telecommunication bandwidth of

8120-540: The content to other streaming services and, temporarily, make extra income like that too. In a reflection made by 2013 Netflix Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos , he was quoted saying, "When we launch in a territory the BitTorrent traffic drops as the Netflix traffic grows." This can be valuably interpreted as in that online piracy numbers drop the more that SVOD companies grow, which in turn means more revenue going back to

8236-406: The correct order by the BitTorrent client, which monitors which pieces it needs, and which pieces it has and can upload to other peers. Pieces are of the same size throughout a single download (for example, a 10 MB file may be transmitted as ten 1 MB pieces or as forty 256 KB pieces). Due to the nature of this approach, the download of any file can be halted at any time and be resumed at

8352-582: The data. The exit node would be visible to peers in a swarm, but the Tribler organization provides exit nodes. One advantage of Tribler is that clearnet torrents can be downloaded with only a small decrease in download speed from one "hop" of routing. i2p provides a similar anonymity layer although in that case, one can only download torrents that have been uploaded to the i2p network. The bittorrent client Vuze allows users who are not concerned about anonymity to take clearnet torrents, and make them available on

8468-467: The download taste of the user, and recommend additional content. In May 2007, researchers at Cornell University published a paper proposing a new approach to searching a peer-to-peer network for inexact strings, which could replace the functionality of a central indexing site. A year later, the same team implemented the system as a plugin for Vuze called Cubit and published a follow-up paper reporting its success. A somewhat similar facility but with

8584-447: The downloaded content at the time they desire, immediately and without any buffering issues. Push VOD depends on the viewer recording content so choices can be limited. Advertising video on demand (AVOD) uses an advertising-based revenue model. This allows companies that advertise on broadcast and cable channels to reach people who watch shows using VOD. This model also allows people to watch content without paying subscription fees. Hulu

8700-504: The economic viability of the VOD model include VOD movie buy-rates and setting Hollywood and cable operator revenue splits. Cable providers offered VOD as part of digital subscription packages, which by 2005 primarily allowed cable subscribers to only access an on-demand version of the content that was already provided in the linear traditional broadcasting distribution. These on-demand packages sometimes include extras and bonus footage in addition to

8816-424: The efficiency of the protocol. When another peer later receives a particular piece, the hash of the piece is compared to the recorded hash to test that the piece is error-free. Peers that provide a complete file are called seeders, and the peer providing the initial copy is called the initial seeder. The exact information contained in the torrent file depends on the version of the BitTorrent protocol. By convention,

8932-505: The feed for new items, and use them to start the download. Then, I could find a trusted publisher of an Alias RSS feed, and "subscribe" to all new episodes of the show, which would then start downloading automatically – like the "season pass" feature of the TiVo . The RSS feed will track the content, while BitTorrent ensures content integrity with cryptographic hashing of all data, so feed subscribers will receive uncorrupted content. One of

9048-727: The file from the web server via standard BitTorrent protocol and when the number of external seeders reach a limit, they stop serving the file from the original source. A technique called broadcatching combines RSS feeds with the BitTorrent protocol to create a content delivery system, further simplifying and automating content distribution. Steve Gillmor explained the concept in a column for Ziff-Davis in December 2003. The discussion spread quickly among bloggers (Ernest Miller, Chris Pirillo , etc.). In an article entitled Broadcatching with BitTorrent , Scott Raymond explained: I want RSS feeds of BitTorrent files. A script would periodically check

9164-734: The file(s). The client connects to those peers to obtain the various pieces. If the swarm contains only the initial seeder, the client connects directly to it, and begins to request pieces. Clients incorporate mechanisms to optimize their download and upload rates. The effectiveness of this data exchange depends largely on the policies that clients use to determine to whom to send data. Clients may prefer to send data to peers that send data back to them (a " tit for tat " exchange scheme), which encourages fair trading. But strict policies often result in suboptimal situations, such as when newly joined peers are unable to receive any data because they do not have any pieces yet to trade themselves or when two peers with

9280-460: The files to be shared and the trackers which keep track of the other seeds and peers. In 2005, first Vuze and then the BitTorrent client introduced distributed tracking using distributed hash tables which allowed clients to exchange data on swarms directly without the need for a torrent file. In 2006, peer exchange functionality was added allowing clients to add peers based on the data found on connected nodes. In 2017, BitTorrent, Inc. released

9396-445: The first and popular software clients ( free and open source ) for broadcatching is Miro . Other free software clients such as PenguinTV and KatchTV are also now supporting broadcatching. The BitTorrent web-service MoveDigital added the ability to make torrents available to any web application capable of parsing XML through its standard REST -based interface in 2006, though this has since been discontinued. Additionally, Torrenthut

9512-577: The goals of publishers that value BitTorrent as a cheap alternative to a client-server approach. This occurs on a huge scale; measurements have shown that 38% of all new torrents become unavailable within the first month. A strategy adopted by many publishers which significantly increases availability of unpopular content consists of bundling multiple files in a single swarm. More sophisticated solutions have also been proposed; generally, these use cross-torrent mechanisms through which multiple torrents can cooperate to better share content. The peer distributing

9628-476: The growing amount of marketing that is need to gain the attention of an audience, pinning down an exact budget for a film production can be difficult. Video on demand can have three release strategies that include: day-and-date (instantaneous release in theaters and on VOD), day-before-date (VOD before theatrical viewing), and VOD only. Production studios can make revenue on these types of releases until sales start to slow. After that, film companies can then license

9744-496: The home, subsequently increased to 25 Mbit/s. The content was provided by the BBC and Anglia Television . Although a technical success, difficulty in sourcing content was a major issue and the project closed in 1996. In 1997, Enron Corporation had entered the broadband market, constructing and purchasing thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables throughout the United States. In 2001, Enron and Blockbuster Inc. attempted to create

9860-494: The i2p network. Most BitTorrent clients are not designed to provide anonymity when used over Tor, and there is some debate as to whether torrenting over Tor acts as a drag on the network. "Private" torrent websites are usually invitation only, and require members to participate in uploading, but have the downside of a single centralized point of failure. Oink's Pink Palace and What.cd are examples of private torrent sites which have been shut down. Seedbox services download

9976-443: The intention of shaping traffic in a protocol-agnostic manner. Questions about the ethics and legality of Comcast's behavior have led to renewed debate about net neutrality in the United States . In general, although encryption can make it difficult to determine what is being shared, BitTorrent is vulnerable to traffic analysis . Thus, even with MSE/PE, it may be possible for an ISP to recognize BitTorrent and also to determine that

10092-504: The large downstream bandwidth present on their cable systems to deliver movies and television shows to end-users. These viewers can typically pause, fast-forward, and rewind VOD movies due to the low latency and random-access nature of cable technology. The large distribution of a single signal makes streaming VOD impractical for most satellite television systems. Both EchoStar / Dish Network and DirecTV offer VOD programming to PVR -owning subscribers of their satellite TV service. In Demand

10208-466: The latest official BitTorrent client (v6) support MSE/PE encryption. In August 2007, Comcast was preventing BitTorrent seeding by monitoring and interfering with the communication between peers. Protection against these efforts is provided by proxying the client-tracker traffic via an encrypted tunnel to a point outside of the Comcast network. In 2008, Comcast called a "truce" with BitTorrent, Inc. with

10324-705: The latter two sources are declining due to streaming services offering much more lucrative performance contracts to performers, and several ring sports organisations (mainly UFC and WWE ) now prefer direct marketing of their product via streaming services such as ESPN+ , the WWE Network , and the apps of Fox Sports over pay-TV providers which require a portion of the profits they otherwise retain directly. In Australia, pay-TV broadcaster Foxtel offers NVOD for new-release movies over their satellite service. Edge Spectrum, an American holder of low-power broadcasting licenses, has an eventual business plan to use its network and

10440-721: The most common in the form of over-the-air television, VOD systems initially required each user to have an Internet connection with considerable bandwidth to access each system's content. In 2000, the Fraunhofer Institute IIS developed the JPEG2000 codec, which enabled the distribution of movies via Digital Cinema Packages. This technology has since expanded its services from feature-film productions to include broadcast television programmes and has led to lower bandwidth requirements for VOD applications. Disney , Paramount , Sony , Universal and Warner Bros. subsequently launched

10556-595: The name of a torrent file has the suffix .torrent . Torrent files use the Bencode file format, and contain an "announce" section, which specifies the URL of the tracker, and an "info" section, containing (suggested) names for the files, their lengths, the piece length used, and a SHA-1 hash code for each piece, all of which are used by clients to verify the integrity of the data they receive. Though SHA-1 has shown signs of cryptographic weakness, Bram Cohen did not initially consider

10672-860: The network, and 3DO as the set-top box with video streams and other information to be deployed to 2,500 homes. In 1994–95, US West filed for a patent concerning the provision of VOD in several cities: 330,000 subscribers in Denver, 290,000 in Minneapolis, and 140,000 in Portland. In early 1994, British Telecommunications (BT) introduced a trial VOD service in the United Kingdom. It used the DCT-based MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video compression standards, along with ADSL technology. Many VOD trials were held with various combinations of server, network, and set-top box. Of these

10788-408: The overall "health" of the file (as determined by the number of times a file is available in its complete form). The distributed nature of BitTorrent can lead to a flood-like spreading of a file throughout many peer computer nodes. As more peers join the swarm, the likelihood of a successful download by any particular node increases. Relative to traditional Internet distribution schemes, this permits

10904-519: The primary players in the US were the telephone companies using DEC, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, USA Video, nCube, SGI, and other servers. The DEC server system was the most-used in these trials. The DEC VOD server architecture used interactive gateways to set up video streams and other information for delivery from any of a large number of VAX servers, enabling it in 1993 to support more than 100,000 streams with full videocassette recorder (VCR)-like functionality. In 1994, it upgraded to

11020-509: The production companies. Behavior detrimental to SVOD revenue Online piracy is detrimental to production companies that produce digital content. In a study that offered BitTorrent users a free SVOD subscription, the results of the research provided readers with information that show download and upload speeds in those homes decreased with a free subscription, but it could not prove decreased use in BitTorrent software. BitTorrent BitTorrent , also referred to simply as torrent ,

11136-521: The protocol in April 2001, and released the first available version on 2 July 2001. Cohen and Ashwin Navin founded BitTorrent, Inc. (later renamed Rainberry, Inc. ) to further develop the technology in 2004. The first release of the BitTorrent client had no search engine and no peer exchange. Up until 2005, the only way to share files was by creating a small text file called a " torrent ", that they would upload to

11252-507: The regular content. Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software allows the distribution of content without the linear costs associated with centralised streaming media . This innovation proved it is technically possible to offer the consumer potentially every film ever made, and the popularity and ease of use of such services may have motivated the rise of centralised video-on-demand services. Some services such as Spotify use peer-to-peer distribution to better scale their platforms. Netflix

11368-441: The risk big enough for a backward incompatible change to, for example, SHA-3 . As of BitTorrent v2 the hash function has been updated to SHA-256. In the early days, torrent files were typically published to torrent index websites, and registered with at least one tracker. The tracker maintained lists of the clients currently connected to the swarm. Alternatively, in a trackerless system (decentralized tracking) every peer acts as

11484-484: The same platforms as traditional TVOD, but at a higher price point, typically about US$ 20 for a 48-hour rental; this offering has again been branded as "Home Premiere" by some studios and platforms. Disney used the September 2020 release of the live-action remake of Mulan to launch a related model called Premier Access ; this requires customers to pay a premium fee (approximately US$ 26–30 depending on country) on top of

11600-410: The service. Just over 8 weeks after launch the VidZone application reached one million in download figures and 100 million video streams while playing host to numerous video exclusives including: On 12 October 2009, VidZone announced that 1.5 million people have used the service. On 31 December 2009 it was announced that VidZone had become the biggest dedicated music video streaming application in

11716-479: The swarm to be deduplicated, so that if multiple torrents include the same files, but seeders are only seeding the file from some, downloaders of the other torrents can still download the file. In addition, file hashes can be displayed on tracker, torrent indexing services, to search for swarms by searching for hashes of files contained in them. These hashes are different from the usual SHA-256 hash of files and can be obtained using tools. Magnet links for v2 also support

11832-471: The torrent files first to the company's servers, allowing the user to direct download the file from there. One's IP address would be visible to the Seedbox provider, but not to third parties. Virtual private networks encrypt transfers, and substitute a different IP address for the user's, so that anyone monitoring a torrent swarm will only see that address. On 2 May 2005, Azureus 2.3.0.0 (now known as Vuze )

11948-639: The tracker. The flag was requested for inclusion in the official specification in August 2008, but has not been accepted yet. Clients that have ignored the private flag were banned by many trackers, discouraging the practice. BitTorrent does not, on its own, offer its users anonymity. One can usually see the IP addresses of all peers in a swarm in one's own client or firewall program. This may expose users with insecure systems to attacks. In some countries, copyright organizations scrape lists of peers, and send takedown notices to

12064-547: The user to ask for content meeting specific criteria (such as containing a given word or phrase) and retrieve a list of links to torrent files matching those criteria. This list can often be sorted with respect to several criteria, relevance (seeders to leechers ratio) being one of the most popular and useful (due to the way the protocol behaves, the download bandwidth achievable is very sensitive to this value). Metasearch engines allow one to search several BitTorrent indices and search engines at once. The Tribler BitTorrent client

12180-442: The user with features of portable media players and DVD players. Some VOD systems store and stream programs from hard disk drives and use a memory buffer to allow the user to fast-forward and rewind videos. It is possible to put video servers on local area networks ; these can provide rapid responses to users. Cable companies have rolled out their own versions of VOD services through apps, allowing television access wherever there

12296-460: The way for the seven Baby Bells— Ameritech , Bell Atlantic , BellSouth , NYNEX , Pacific Telesis , Southwestern Bell , and US West —to implement VOD systems. These companies and others began holding trials to set up systems for supplying video on demand over telephone and cable lines. In November 1992, Bell Atlantic announced a VOD trial. IBM was developing a video server code-named Tiger Shark. Concurrently, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)

12412-434: The world having been downloaded 2 million times, and streamed 200 million videos. On 22 April 2010, VidZone announced they are to launch VidZone TV on PS3, which includes 100 'channels' of pre-loaded music videos, behind-the-scenes videos and live concert footage. On 9 November 2011 Vidzone was updated to version 2.0 which greatly enhanced a number of features of the service. The UI was completely overhauled to include

12528-434: Was a major AVOD company before ending its free service in August 2016, transferring it to Yahoo! View using the existing Hulu infrastructure. Crackle has introduced a series of advertisements for the same company that ties into the content that is being watched. Ad-Supported Video on Demand (ASVOD) refers to video services that provide free content supported by advertisements. Popular services include Pluto TV , Xumo ,

12644-427: Was among the first to incorporate built-in search capabilities. With Tribler, users can find .torrent files held by random peers and taste buddies. It adds such an ability to the BitTorrent protocol using a gossip protocol , somewhat similar to the eXeem network which was shut down in 2005. The software includes the ability to recommend content as well. After a dozen downloads, the Tribler software can roughly estimate

12760-534: Was developing a scalable video server configured from small-to-large for a range of video streams. Bell Atlantic selected IBM and in April 1993 the system became the first VOD over ADSL to be deployed outside the lab, serving 50 video streams. In June 1993, US West filed for a patent to register a proprietary system consisting of the Digital Equipment Corporation Interactive Information Server, Scientific Atlanta providing

12876-466: Was launched on 16 November 2006 and the BBC's iPlayer , which was launched on 25 December 2007. Another example of online video publishers using legal peer-to-peer technology is based on Giraffic technology, which was launched in early 2011, with large online VOD publishers such as US-based VEOH and UK-based Craze's Online Movies Box movie rental service. Unlike broadcast television, which traditionally has been

12992-437: Was released, utilizing a distributed database system. This system is a distributed hash table implementation which allows the client to use torrents that do not have a working BitTorrent tracker . A bootstrap server is instead utilized. The following month, BitTorrent, Inc. released version 4.2.0 of the Mainline BitTorrent client, which supported an alternative DHT implementation (popularly known as " Mainline DHT ", outlined in

13108-442: Was reported to be considering switching to a P2P model to cope with net neutrality problems from downstream providers. Transactional video on demand (TVOD) is a distribution method by which customers pay for each piece of video-on-demand content. For example, a customer would pay a fee for each movie or TV show that they watch. TVOD has two sub-categories: electronic sell-through (EST), by which customers can permanently access

13224-533: Was restricted to London. After attracting 40,000 customers, they were bought by Tiscali in 2006 which was, in turn, bought by Talk Talk in 2009. Cable TV providers Telewest and NTL (now Virgin Media) launched their VOD services in the United Kingdom in 2005, competing with the leading traditional pay-TV distributor BSkyB , which responded by launching Sky by broadband , later renamed Sky Anytime on PC . The service went live on 2 January 2006. Sky Anytime on PC uses

13340-449: Was shut down due to a lack of funding. VOD services are now available in all parts of the United States, which has the highest global take-up rate of VOD. In 2010, 80% of American Internet users had watched video online, and 42% of mobile users who downloaded video preferred apps to a normal browser. Streaming VOD systems are available on desktop and mobile platforms from cable providers (in tandem with cable modem technology). They use

13456-448: Was watched, when it was watched, what they watched after watching, and even how many people watched the same video at the same time in a day, month, and even year. Economics of SVOD Attendance in movie theaters had declined during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Worldwide in 2019, theatrical entertainment reach 11.4 billion dollars, but in 2020, it was only 2.2 billion. Due recovery efforts to increase those attendance numbers, along with

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