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October 16, 2003

Kazaa / Altnet

Info from arose@bde.com.au on the Kazaa/Altnet distribution model.

The person to contact is Christian von Burkleo in our LA office - cvonburkleo@altnet.com - he can help with pricing and, well, pretty much take care of everything from DRM wrapping your content to making it appear in Kazaa and elsewhere. We can also - if needed - host your file on our fallback web server though for large files (over, say, 50MB) we prefer that partners host the files themselves.

In case you're wondering why there is a fallback web server (this is P2P after all), here's how it works:
We make you file appear as a gold icon file in Kazaa.
When users click to download your file it searches the P2P network.
If the file cannot be found on the P2P network - or it it's downloading too slowly - then the file will be downloaded in whole or in part from the fallback web server.
When the download completes then that user begins sharing out the file themselves.
The result is around 90% reduction in bandwidth serving costs (rising to over 95% for popular files) compared to serving the whole file from your web server.

Using the Altnet Download Manager you can even make the file available on your own web site - users will be able to click and download it without needing Kazaa, and you'll get the same ~90% bandwidth saving (and users may well get a much faster download experience than a single HTTP connection to your server would have given).

We regularly promote files of 300MB or more, with a couple of files hitting 1GB (though the handling on such large files tends to be a pain so 200MB would be at the upper end of the "sweet spot" for movies).

If you need more technical info I'd be glad to help out.

BTW, we and Kazaa are quite different. Altnet handles only digitally signed content placed with the permission of the content owner and Kazaa does, well, whatever Kazaa does.

Posted by .M. at October 16, 2003 02:33 PM
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