(Posted from Geneva on Sunday, 8:30 am)

In a followup to my weblog entry “BitTrickle,” computer scientist Ed Felten offers an interesting analysis that could explain why ordinary users’ experience of BitTorrent when downloading television is so often more disappointing than either BitTorrent’s boosters or the MPAA’s lawyers make it seem. Responding to the New York Times article asserting that BitTorrent makes TV episodes arrive in “minutes,” Felten writes the following:

The NYT article seems to make a common error in thinking about BitTorrent. BitTorrent’s main effect is not to make downloads faster as the number of users increases, but to keep downloads from getting much slower. A simple model can explain why this is so. (As with all good models, this one gets the important things right but ignores some details.)…

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