UK ISP's asked to voluntarily block 100 P2P cyberlocker sites

Meridian said:
It was pointed out a long time ago that the big gap is not between £1 and £10, it's between £0 and £1 - most people already downloading illegal stuff will continue to do stuff as long as legally it costs anything at all. Very few people download illegally because the prices of legal stuff are too high, no matter what they might protest in public.


M
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It costs about £10 for rapidshare, usenet subscriptions and torrent site "donations". Add a seedbox, VPN and whatever else and many people are spending £20+ a month on piracy.

20% peak internet traffic in the US (up to 95% in Canada) is Netflix downloads and they don't even have much good content. There's a big demand for it.

http://gizmodo.com/#!5672618/netflix-completely-dominates-the-internet-in-canada
 
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kwerk said:
It costs about £10 for rapidshare, usenet subscriptions and torrent site "donations". Add a seedbox, VPN and whatever else and many people are spending £20+ a month on piracy.
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And how much are they downloading, and how does it compare to your suggested £2 a throw? I'd guess that they are getting enough to be equivalent to 50p a item or better.


M
 
Werewolf said:
Aye, and it's also a fallacy to think that costs scale quite that easily - just because a million people download something when the price is £20, doesn't mean that any significant additional number will buy it at £2...

That's before you consider that actually producing the content costs money, the actual cost of putting it onto physical medium is a relatively small part of that total cost (especially when dealing with production runs of many thousands), and something like a Film will have a higher overhead to supply via download than say an MP3 (and at some point the cost of providing a lot of downloads will surpass the cost the cost of supplying physical medium for the same total income).
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You might want to tell (not sure if I'm allowed to say the name?) begins with A that. They are streaming movies in the US from $.99 each, the selection is rubbish though. It costs a fraction of a cent to stream a movie.

It costs $1 per Mpbs for transit from hurricane-electric, cogent, etc. on a GigE commit. Much less if you're buying 100s of gigs I'd imagine.

1 Mbps would be roughly 300 GB transfer a month, so $1 for 300GB. Let's say a divx encoded movie is 1gb, that is 300 movies download for $1. Only 1/3 of a cent each.

Even if you added $2 per Mbps for equipment, engineer salaries and everything else that's only 1 cent per movie. Can you make and package DVDs and ship them across the country for 1 cent each?
 
kwerk said:
You might want to tell (not sure if I'm allowed to say the name?) begins with A that. They are streaming movies in the US from $.99 each, the selection is rubbish though. It costs a fraction of a cent to stream a movie.

It costs $1 per Mpbs for transit from hurricane-electric, cogent, etc. on a GigE commit. Much less if you're buying 100s of gigs I'd imagine.

1 Mbps would be roughly 300 GB transfer a month, so $1 for 300GB. Let's say a divx encoded movie is 1gb, that is 300 movies download for $1. Only 1/3 of a cent each.

Even if you added $2 per Mbps for equipment, engineer salaries and everything else that's only 1 cent per movie. Can you make and package DVDs and ship them across the country for 1 cent each?
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Vudu.com I reckon.
 
kwerk said:
You might want to tell (not sure if I'm allowed to say the name?) begins with A that. They are streaming movies in the US from $.99 each
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But they aren't trying to attract people who download illegally, they're trying to entice people who would buy DVDs to buy in a different format. One that I would guess has larger margins for the River Company. More to the point, the argument I cited only applies to people who are likely to download illegally. For those who would be unlikely to do so, normal economics works just fine: these people are prepared to pay, but want the cheapest format.


M
 
kwerk said:
You might want to tell (not sure if I'm allowed to say the name?) begins with A that. They are streaming movies in the US from $.99 each, the selection is rubbish though. It costs a fraction of a cent to stream a movie.
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You've got the right idea, but your calculations are a bit exaggerated.

kwerk said:
It costs $1 per Mpbs for transit from hurricane-electric, cogent, etc. on a GigE commit. Much less if you're buying 100s of gigs I'd imagine.
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Cogent and Hurricane Electric are bottom of the barrel providers with relatively poor networks. Amazon's main IP transit providers are NTT, Tiscali and Level3; if you can get sub-$5/Mbps on a GigE commit with any of those I'd be very impressed.

kwerk said:
1 Mbps would be roughly 300 GB transfer a month, so $1 for 300GB. Let's say a divx encoded movie is 1gb, that is 300 movies download for $1. Only 1/3 of a cent each.
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~300GB/month would be if the bandwidth were utilised 24/7 for the entire month. Most transit is charged on a 95th percentile basis, so Amazon will be paying for an absurd amount of bandwidth to cover peak hours, then most of that will go unused in off-peak hours. On average, each Mbit would probably only shift 100GB/month.
 
Werewolf said:
Aye, and it's also a fallacy to think that costs scale quite that easily - just because a million people download something when the price is £20, doesn't mean that any significant additional number will buy it at £2...

That's before you consider that actually producing the content costs money, the actual cost of putting it onto physical medium is a relatively small part of that total cost (especially when dealing with production runs of many thousands), and something like a Film will have a higher overhead to supply via download than say an MP3 (and at some point the cost of providing a lot of downloads will surpass the cost the cost of supplying physical medium for the same total income).
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Steam said after their first big sale that their profits went up 80% or something insane when they set a lot of more expensive games to sub 5 pound prices. (profits for those games not total profits)
 
chaosdestro0 said:
Are you sure that your open dns settings were not changed?
Had a look on google news and have not found anything showing this happening.
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Positive, I don't use openDNS for blocking sites, it was really weird. I've moved over to google's DNS though and the problem disappeared.

I've been able to check on a different network and openDNS has blocked anything p2p related there as well.
 
$3.50 vps a month, download torrents/rapidshare/whatever at 10meg, download to your own pc via ftp. If people want to pirate they will.
 
Werewolf said:
Aye, and it's also a fallacy to think that costs scale quite that easily - just because a million people download something when the price is £20, doesn't mean that any significant additional number will buy it at £2...
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While sales do not scale that easily, they did a study on digtal downloads and when the price was 30% lower, people spend 50% more.

Or vice-versa, i'll try and dig it out.

i think most people remember when CD new release cost £15+ and that was by no means as high as it was in the previous decades.
 
Stack em deep sell em cheap is how Wal-Mart became one of the biggest companies in the world. Just give people what they want. $2 is better than $0.

There are a few companies trying to do that like Redbox and Netflix but they are getting grief from these backwards thinking movie companies that they can't do it to the full potential.

Now China, Egypt, Romania, etc are still going to pirate because they don't much much other choice even at $2. But I reckon the number of people in the west that would 'convert' would be massive.

At $15-20 a film it's worth the effort maintaining a ratio, paying for a vpn and all that. $2 not so much.

As for the operating cost it says here 5 cents for an HD movie.

http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2010/08/what-it-costs-netflix-to-stream-a-movie.html

Akamai charges a customer like Netflix about 5 cents for an HD movie, compared with about 3 cents for standard definition. "We're right on the cusp of rapid adoption" of HD, Sagan says.
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