Theoretical Solutions for Pres Site Brandwidth issues

Although sparked by The TV Room's current issues this is related to all sites of the same ilk.

When I joined TV Home Forum years ago there were LOADS of these sites around. Many also offering MP3s of the news music. (Identz is meant to be returning too on that note). Now one by one they've closed and an oft cited issue is data transfer costs.

Now obviously we all want something for nothing and I'll freely admit that as much as I like Mike's site I have no intention of parting with any cash to keep it going.

So what's the solution? Does anyone with technical knowhow have any ideas of what could be done?

I mentioned in the other thread some sort of moderated P2P system. Could sites like The TV Room use bittorrent for such things? With so many people now on broadband with 24/7 connections it's much more feasable than previously.

I don't fully understand the ins and outs of bt but I believe all the host would need to keep would be a core copy and a tracker. In which case it would reduce bandwidth considerably. But I'm also aware these files are small compared to the 300mb videos people often download with BT.

So could we set up a mirror network? Could all of us with webspace somehow utilise it to keep a central downloads.ukpres.com mirror network running?

Or could these rapidshare type things that are often used to mvoe porn around be a solution? How reliable are they? The fact it is HTTP would mean it would be less hassle than using a bittorrent client although there is the silly 30 second wait issue.

How about people try using the Corel CDN?

It works simply by sticking a .nuyd.net:8090 onto the end of the address. So for example, the TV Room would be http://thetvroom.com.nyud.net:8090 . Once the cached copy is on the CDN, the host, e.g. the TV Room in this case, won't be hit as much. Unfortunately, the TV Room's site seems to use hardcoded URLs that point to thetvroom.com rather than the path of the file - e.g. /files/bbcone/balloon97.rm so it's a little difficult for it to work.

I had this problem when hosting the Sky News videos on a lowly 256k up ADSL connection - browsing was pretty much made unusable because everyone wanted to download it at once. I can't afford hosting with such large transfers and I wish BT would up their upload rates, but this is BT we are talking about.

Bringing in the cache solved the problem, but the big gotcha was that content was stale for a good few hours before it was refreshed. But it helped to reduce the load, and once it was in the system people got nice fast download speeds, since the majority of these caches sit on high speed networks.

Bit Torrent - it's the way forward, and it could also mean better quality captures - high res divx captures for example, as I've done for other torrent websites.

They could use hosting comp which have uncapped Data Transfer like Heart Internet to name a few.

Unfortunately, no company will offer real uncapped data transfer unless it is willing to go bust or suffer poor performance from people hammering the bandwidth circuits that they have connected. Or they use rubbish cheap providers whose circuits are already close to saturation and/or suffer frequent downtime or poor connectivity. There's no way you can have truly unlimited data transfer - not unless you pay a lot of money.

I would liken the ones that offer supposedly unlimited bandwidth to those all you can eat Chinese/Indian/whatever restaurants. There's a hidden upper set limit at which you can consume food before getting chucked off or being made to pay extra.

how would we set about doing it though? would mike need to keep a tracker on his site?

Opera are introducing bittorrent I notice and I think there is a firefox extensio to integrate it so it might not be that geeky.

I personally don't see the benefits of Bit Torrent for such small file-sizes. The idea of just opening a page and clicking on the file-link and viewing the file, seems to work best. It is also page impressions which take up the bandwidth, as well as stills and pages on the server. I'm sure people visit the site for the images as much as the video clips...

ISTR something about trackerless torrents, but i think it's still in the early stages. As mdta said, it is not very practical to download a torrent for every clip on a webpage, loading the tracker up, etc. It needs to be more mainstream for it to work with your average pres site user.

I can't really think of any other way though really, apart from newer codecs (real 10 or something) and using lower bitrates

How about uploading the video files onto Google Video?