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April 22, 2005

The Corporate Mindset

I like to think I'm a fairly analytical person, examining problems from all angles and presenting a solution that I feel will solve the issue at hand most competently. Often when doing this, I don't look into external factors like media perception, market-share, and what have you. Now allow me to explain a recent problem I encountered and the reaction it achieved.

At my office, we've spent the last few months creating a series of video clips for use during testing. All the content is royalty free as we created it, though there are several terabytes of data. We have everything ranging from low bit-rates to high bit-rates, to even uncompressed data. We have encodings in WMV, DiVX, Quicktime, Xvid, and who knows what other formats (I stopped paying attention to this detail awhile back). Each clip has multiple time lengths as well, with 8 seconds being the shortest, and 2 hours being the longest. Some are in standard def, while others are in high def.

It was recently brought to our attention that other parties may actually be interested in our work, and sharing it with them on our bandwidth limited pipe may impede this behavior. Unfortunately serving the data off of a high bandwidth pipe becomes too cost prohibitive. The next option was to mirror out the data to other locations around the world (basically creating a content distribution network based upon locality). In my mind, all of these are exactly the wrong solution.

Why? In each of these cases, under ideal conditions things will work perfectly. When the network becomes too saturated, or disconnects, the real problems begin. You cannot restart a download of a several gigabyte file using any of the standard IT supported distribution methods (i.e. FTP-passive, or HTTP) without segmenting the files to chunks. Hence I suggested putting up a BitTorrent server to distribute the data. If you're going to start chunking data anyways, why not put into place a system that will allow for distributed downloading and supports chunked data natively? More importantly all the consumers of our data will slowly become distributors of it as well. This benefits not just us, but any consumers who wish utilize our media.

After having made this suggestion aloud, the silence in the room was deafening. It seems that the IT department is completely against this idea for a couple of reasons, none of which they'd vocalize in front of me. My best guesses include:

  • 1) It sucks up bandwidth. Yep, that it does. Although it will suck up progressively less bandwidth as more customers utilize the service. On the other hand, the bandwidth cost will still be the same if we continue to host a centralized server as we currently are planning. Basically I see the short term loss of bandwidth for the long term gain of distributed bandwidth not being a significant reason to cancel this idea.

  • 2 MPAA/RIAA threats. With the current political climate towards P2P file sharing, it's hard to argue this one. The RIAA and MPAA have done a really good job in their recent propaganda march to paint P2P as only evil. The best counter I can conceive of is that all the media being distributed is generated by us, we own the royalties for everything. How the two evil empires can bully us around at that point, I'm not sure.

  • 3 Security. BitTorrent has been fairly stable and strong in it's consumption of the Internet. One of the areas it's still fairly untested in is security. Not having examined the code, or even being able to understand much of it that well, I can't vouch on this one.

    • Any suggestions on how to convince the IT department that this wouldn't be the most evil thing in the world?

    Posted by Dan at April 22, 2005 12:58 AM