Another ShredTorrent Experiment
It’s tough hosting footbag videos. These days there are more of them and because a lot of people are on broadband connections, the demand for quality has increased substantially with a rough guess at an estimated average file size of 40-50 megabytes.
While bandwidth isn’t too much of an issue for us right now, I’m always looking for the new technologies that will allow us to grow and provide the best experience for our users. Enter Bittorrent. While it is still pretty technical and most users “don’t get it”, the process is getting easier for us to host torrrent files of our videos and for our users to download them.
I tried introducing this concept last year as the “Shred Torrent” using super-beta software and it seemed to work for a while (and it got some use), but fizzled out fast as it was reporting false information and generally not working well. A while back, however, I discovered The Participatory Culture Foundation who had built Broadcast Machine on top of the BlogTorrent software we had been using (note that we have a front page mention on the Blog Torrent site!). To get to the point, allow me to introduce:
Shred TV
The major issue with the last attempt (beside the software not really working), was that once a video had been posted, someone always had to stay seeding the file or it was effectively useless. We’d have 18 people trying to download from 2 seeders. This time around the software supports “server seeding”, meaning that the Freedom server will always have a copy of a given video available.
So, I think we’re ready to let people go ahead and register and upload videos to be shared via whatever bittorrent software users care to employ.
This is just an experiment and will not, at this point, be taking the place of our existing galleries. Feedback is always appreciated and, in this case, encouraged and needed!!
