CNN video is asking me if I want to install the Octoshape Grid Delivery Enhancement for Flash video to speed things up. I'm not sure I want to install it. Any one have an opinion? I'm running Win 7 64 bit.
Looks like it's basically torrent technology. In itself it's not really a bad thing, however in my brief experimentation with torrents i did receive a few infected files which i could have gotten cleanly through more direct methods so i stopped using it.
Note that the speed benefit comes from multiple users around the globe all sharing bits of the file with each other. While this is a nifty idea in some ways it does have a fewf issues that lots of new users don't realize at first.
- If it's new content then there are unlikely to be many other people who have many of the parts yet, so you will still be fetching from the original "seed" which won't give you much benefit.
- Many of the pieces may be stored on end-user computers with very slow upload speeds. No matter how fast your download speed is, the file won't move faster than the slowest link in the chain. My experience was that fetching from torrents were some of the most abysmally slow downloads i've ever fetched.
- In order for this sharing method to be effective you'll be expected to keep the content on your own computer and allow other people to retrieve parts from you. If your upload connection is slow then you may risk saturating it as more and more people start retrieving from you. Your ISP may also not allow it and impose various sanctions on your account if it's abused in this way.
- The entity that really benefits is the original content provider who no longer has to serve up a complete copy of the file to everyone who wants to see it. It doesn't really seem to have much actual benefit for the viewers. All their claims about better quality and such are ideal benefits in the best situations that are unlikely to actually be seen by you.
Thanks Kelly for that lucid and instructive explanation. Why am I not surprised that CNN.COM gets the major benefit. Back in the heyday of Napster, I think it was something similar. I certainly want things like this far from my editing machine, but I might try it on some other "internet only" system to see if there is any real benefit.
- Paul