I'm betting that all of the bandwidth consumed by Napster downloads would look laughably small today. Anyone have some numbers to run?
Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)
171–180 of 189 posts
Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arguably without Napster the major music labels would never have accommodated the iTunes Store and then Spotify. We’d still be slinging physical media around as the only non-radio option. If you didn’t live through that time I think it’s hard to appreciate how necessary the disruption was for moving the industry forward.
"If it ever gets too bad, they'll just steal again" should hang on the wall of every media distribution company. Consolidation efforts like Netflix prevented piracy, but the splintering of streaming services has encouraged it, and sports (and especially football) has become the great fulcrum. Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess. Cable is using them to cling for dear…
> Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess.
I would watch way more baseball if it weren't for MLB.com. It's got some OK features, but overall the service is a garbage fire technically. They stuck with Flash until the bitter end. But even if they fixed the technical issues, the restrictions on access cripple the service.
Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> steal again Can we avoid the conflation of piracy and stealing? Stealing under the pre-internet definition has very different consequences from the duplication of copyable resources.
At the individual level, you're denying the copyright holder and the dependency chain of rent extractors the money from a purchase transaction they're legally entitled to, if you were willing to pay and jump through whatever hoops were in place as a potential customer. Game of thrones streaming issues showed people don't like hoops or shitty service. If you're not a potential customer, and don't share the media, copy…
> the dependency chain of rent extractors
Especially this part. Spotify in particular is bad this way, with the artists getting a nearly invisibly small slice of the money. Youtube isn't much better. Reduce the friction that prevents me from giving my money directly to the artists to support their work and I'd be a much bigger paying consumer of online media.
Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)
#174Circa 2002, Penn State limited each on-campus student connection to (my memory is fuzzy so don't hold me to exact numbers) 1.5GB combined upload and download per week. But, anything transferred within the Penn State network did not count towards the cap. This is where I should say that Penn State has 12+ campuses spread throughout the entire state of Pennsylvania so we could transfer stuff between Erie, PA and State…
Was this the birth of i2hub?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2hub
I remember the first time I saw a file download faster than 80mbps was using i2hub. It was 4am and I remember thinking at the time "shit, I'm gonna get flagged" and sure enough my dorm internet was disconnected the next morning. Fun times.
Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)
#175There was something about piracy in the times of Napster, emule and the like. It really made you feel like you knew some incantation to get access to the whole world's information. In practical terms, I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc) and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times. Perhaps it was just th…
There was no algorithm to "guide" your search, there was no limitation, no manipulation. Just you get what you see, and what you get - is all there is. Everything from there, was experience-wise a downgrade.
Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If it ever gets too bad, they'll just steal again" should hang on the wall of every media distribution company. Consolidation efforts like Netflix prevented piracy, but the splintering of streaming services has encouraged it, and sports (and especially football) has become the great fulcrum. Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess. Cable is using them to cling for dear…
F1's online presence under Liberty Media is a great example of how to do it right. Every race gets same-day highlights on YouTube within hours, along with tons of interview and analysis content. You can be an F1 fan and not spend a penny to watch the entire season. But the premium option to watch full events live is still there, along with merchandising, (quite good) licensed video games, etc. As a result, F1 is grow…
The nature of F1 lends itself to this highlight model, as you can get 90% of the experience of a race from the 10 minutes of highlights extracted from 1.5hours of racing.
Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)
#177There was something about piracy in the times of Napster, emule and the like. It really made you feel like you knew some incantation to get access to the whole world's information. In practical terms, I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc) and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times. Perhaps it was just th…
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Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)
#178There was something about piracy in the times of Napster, emule and the like. It really made you feel like you knew some incantation to get access to the whole world's information. In practical terms, I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc) and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times. Perhaps it was just th…
“Perhaps it's that I now feel like I'm being sold what others want to put on my plate”
It’s not just you. Spotify makes you think “here’s a song similar to the last one” but I’m sure that algorithm is skewed by this record label or that, or the cost per play is cheaper for this one, and it’s not “discovery” anymore but spoonfed
Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
F1's online presence under Liberty Media is a great example of how to do it right. Every race gets same-day highlights on YouTube within hours, along with tons of interview and analysis content. You can be an F1 fan and not spend a penny to watch the entire season. But the premium option to watch full events live is still there, along with merchandising, (quite good) licensed video games, etc. As a result, F1 is grow…
I'm not sure about that. The Serie A (Italian football/soccer) also puts same-hour highlights on YouTube within hours, but people still use illegal streaming all the time. You lose a lot by not following a sport in real time, especially if such sport is part of your social environment, and likewise you lose a lot if you just see highlights. For an example of a perfect digital play, I think the America's Cup would be…
Football’s drama plays out over the course of the entire match, with the evolution of play happening minute to minute and any small mistake turning into big moments. Highlights take away from that drama.
Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Napster, in many ways, gave birth to BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and all of the derivative work thereof. You say that, but before Napster, there was Seti(?), a program that would search for extra-terrestrial life - by distributing the work load on top your personal laptop
sounds like bitcoin mining without making money
How funny - you must be a little younger.
When bitcoin mining first became a thing, it felt like they'd found a way to make distributed computing (like the seti and protein folding projects) profitable.