An interesting presentation from CacheLogic: The True Picture of Peer-To-Peer Filesharing.
They studied data moving through the Bit Torrent, eDonkey/eMule, FastTrack/KaZaA and Gnuttella networks, and made a number of measurements, observations and conclusions… including:
- Dicplacement: RIAA action on Bit Torrent hosts has simply displaced traffic back onto the eDonkey network, rather than decreasing the overall volume of p2p
- Significant use: not just a few “heavy users”
- Asia/America: heavier use in these continents than Europe
The BBC News article also suggested that video was slightly on the decline on the Bit Torrent network, although I saw no evidence of that in the slides.
Further more, the analysis by CacheLogic used file extension to determine content-type — a lot of video content is now being distributed in archive format (.rar, .tz, etc) on Bit Torrent, which might suggest a slight flaw in the way they determine content.