The corporate and conservative Comcast has never been a friend of Internet neutrality. The free-wheeling BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol that rose to prominence in the wake of Napster’s demise, has never been held up as a bastion of ethical use of the Internet. So you should not be surprised to hear that Comcast has been making it difficult for its subscribers to download files from BitTorrent sites.

Comcast shifts gears

Last week, as reported in the New York Times, Comcast announced a change in its strategy for dealing with BitTorrent. It would now “take a more equitable approach toward managing the ever-expanding flow of Web traffic.” In particular, “instead of interfering with specific online applications” (aka BitTorrent), “it will manage traffic by slowing the Internet speeds of its most bandwidth-hogging users when traffic is busiest.”

In other words, instead of a “censorship” of a specific site, Comcast will instead go after individual users whom Comcast views as abusing the network.

While both of Comcast’s solutions have come under fire by some proponents of network neutrality (a principle that I strongly support), Comcast’s new approach seems preferable to me. At the very least, it moves away from the slippery slope of multiple tiers of Web sites, each with different speed limits — a concept that could destroy the democratic nature of the Web, making it almost impossible for smaller startup sites to get the traction they need to grow.

But why, you may ask, should Comcast do anything punitive at all? Why shouldn’t Comcast instead attempt to increase its bandwidth to handle the load, if necessary? Good questions. While I would welcome such a bandwidth boost as the most “neutral” solution, I believe some defensive management by Comcast is acceptable here. The rationale in a nutshell is this:

BitTorrent’s primary activity is illegal. Although there are certainly legitimate uses for BitTorrent, its primary use (as far as I can tell) is to illegally download commercial movies and television shows. Indeed, one of the most popular BitTorrent sites — Pirate’s Bay (its name alone pretty much gives away its function) — has been described as “famous for their blatant disregard for intellectual property rights.” Another site, TorrentSpy, recently closed down because the “legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile.”

BitTorrent’s downloads can be a giant bandwidth hog. It typically takes a minimum of 4 to 5 hours to download a movie; it can often take 12 hours or more. If many users on the same network are doing this at the same time, you can imagine the negative effect such lengthy sustained activity can have on a network. This is especially an issue on cable networks, where a subscriber’s Internet speed declines as the number of active users on their local node increases. This means that if your neighbors are busy downloading movies, your Internet connection can slow down even though you are not engaging in any questionable activity.

Given this, it is at least understandable that Comcast would want to take some action other than spending the money needed to allow full-speed unlimited BitTorrent downloads for everyone. In the long run, I expect bandwidth to increase to the point that this will no longer be a relevant issue. But we are not there yet.

I give BitTorrent a whirl

Until recently, I had never downloaded a movie from a BitTorrent site. The questionable legality of doing so was the primary inhibition. But it also didn’t seem worth the bother. I knew that the quality of such downloads could be quite inferior. In some cases, files were based on recordings taken with a camcorder at a movie theater where the film was showing. If you wanted a DVD-like experience (which I did), you weren’t going to get it here. Even so, I wanted to download a movie or two as a test case, just so I could better understand how it all worked. However, I found it almost impossible to complete a successful download. This was likely partly due to Comcast’s afore-mentioned constraints, but also — as I later learned — from not having created the needed firewall settings. In any case, I gave up trying.

As background for this blog posting, I decided to try again. This time I was successful — and I was impressed with the results.

Using the Torrentz Web site, I searched for The Bourne Ultimatum. Many copies of the film showed up. The site offers numerous aids to help you decide which copy to prefer, including user comments about the general quality of the file (”great download,” “almost DVD quality”). After selecting one copy — and a server from which to get it — I downloaded a torrent file for the film. The next step is to shift to a torrent-compatible application, load the torrent file and (at last) initiate the download. Then you wait. The speed of a download remains highly variable (and is affected by what download server you select as well as whether or not you have files that you share with others). For The Bourne Ultimatum, it took me about 5 hours (which is considered to be a quick download).

The movie file was in the .mp4 format, which meant that I could directly import it into iTunes and transfer it to my Apple TV. (Most BitTorrent files appear to be in .avi format, which requires a conversion before you can move it to an Apple TV.) Once it was transferred, I began watching the movie on my 32″ LCD television. The quality was surprisingly good. It was comparable to what I see with movies downloaded from the iTunes Store. I next tried burning the movie to a DVD and playing it on my 55″ HD television. This too worked, but the lesser quality of the movie file, as compared to a DVD, was now easy to see. Still, I imagine many people would find it more than acceptable. Especially for free.

It was a somewhat convoluted and time-consuming route to a final destination, certainly more so than simply buying a DVD or renting a movie from iTunes. And the quality of the final results were by no means guaranteed. Added to this is the question of its legality. All in all, I don’t see this taking off with the general public as widely as music file sharing. At least not yet. Still, Hollywood has good reason to be afraid here. It wouldn’t take much for this market to explode, decimating DVD sales the way that music file-sharing did to sales of CDs.

On the positive front, iTunes has now surpassed Walmart as the #1 music retailer in the U.S. This means, that despite the availability of illegal music downloading, the market for legal downloading is strong and continues to grow. This can work for movies as well. That’s why Hollywood should move — even more aggressively than they already are — to make their movies available on the Internet, at a reasonable price. Because, for better or worse, and despite the efforts of Comcast and others, movie file-sharing isn’t going away.

Addendum: A word to the wise: the MPAA takes action

Someone I know informed me that his Internet connection mysteriously stopped working the other day. He called Time Warner Cable (his ISP) to find out what happened. They told him that his modem had been “quarantined” because the MPAA had notified Time Warner about his BitTorrent downloading of movies. Time Warner removed the quarantine immediately after the phone conversation. However, they warned him that, if they continued to receive notifications from the MPAA, his Internet access would be suspended for an unspecified length of time and eventually permanently blocked. Exactly how the MPAA became aware of and identified the source of the download activity is not certain. However, I have heard that the MPAA may masquerade as a source on BitTorrent sites so as to obtain the IP addresses of people who attempt to download movies.

Last week, I read Dan Frake’s intriguing column describing his re-evaluation of the MacBook Air. Essentially, after extended time using an Air while on vacation, Dan found that he did not miss the Air’s lack of traditional features nearly as much as he had anticipated.

This reminded me of a question I have been thinking about ever since the MacBook Air was released: What is the future of the optical drive?

The Air’s “missing” optical drive has often been subject to the same sort of criticism leveled against the original iMac’s lack of a floppy disk drive. The iMac did have a built-in optical drive, but it was not a CD-writer, so there was no way to save data to a CD. The lack of a floppy disk drive was thus not a trivial matter. Yet, over the next few years, not only did the iMac survive sans a floppy drive, it thrived. At the same time, the floppy disk drive was dropped from all computers from all vendors, relegating it to the dustbin of computer history.

Could the same thing happen to the optical drive? Not right away. But I believe it will happen, and sooner than you might think.

For the moment, Apple offers two solutions to compensate for the Air’s MIA optical drive:

The first is to buy an external optical drive, such as the one Apple now sells. This works fine for when you are at your base location, but does not fit well with the intended portability of the MacBook Air.

The second is for the Air to share a drive from another Mac via the new Remote Disc option. This works reasonably well, including for accessing an unbootable Air from an Install DVD — as long as you have a second Mac available. But it is not a total substitute. For example, you can’t use a shared drive to play movies. And it is no solution at all if you don’t have a second Mac or are on the road where no Mac is available.

What about the third option: Doing without an optical drive at all? Before this is truly viable, we’ll need two incremental advances in current technology:

1. Much faster Internet speeds. In one sweep, a significant speed boost could eliminate as much as 90% of the need for an optical drive. When you can transfer gigabytes of data in the time it now takes to move megabytes, it will be practical to use the Web to do just about anything you now do with an optical drive: play music, watch movies, purchase software, or backup your drive. Even at today’s slower speeds, we are already doing much of this. With much faster speeds (which are predicted for a not too distant future), it will not only be possible but preferable. I’ve already discussed this, as it relates to movies, in a previous blog entry.

2. Very cheap flash and card media storage. I see matters moving in two directions at once here.

First, to substitute for bootable discs, we’ll shift to bootable flash drives. [Note: In an upcoming column, I’ll have more to say about how these work.] The cost of these drives continues to drop — often dramatically. You can now purchase a 512MB drive for as little as $.05! That’s like free. A 4GB drive can be had for around $20. In a related “sign of the times,” after Sony discovered a firmware problem with the model of their LCD television that I owned, they sent me (and all other owners) a flash drive to update the TV’s firmware!

Second, for greater storage capability, we can shift to media cards, just like the ones now used in digital cameras. A Mac could access these cards via a USB card reader, which is a much more portable accessory than an optical drive (these could even be built-in to a MacBook Air down the road). Amazon already sells 4GB SD cards for as little as $19. Before too long, prices should drop down to about the cost of a DVD (at least a dual-layer DVD), making the cards a true competitive alternative.

For archival storage, media cards and flash drives may not be as durable as CDs and DVDs, but I believe they will be good enough that most users will be content to forgo an optical drive.

When all of these puzzle pieces fall into place, the optical drive will be ripe to join the floppy drive in the dustbin. This day is still at least a few years away, especially with the push to Blu-ray prolonging the life of optical discs. But the day is coming.

The HD-DVD format is dead. Toshiba made it official the other day, “conceding defeat to the competing Blu-ray technology backed by Sony.” With retailers dropping the format from their stores and studios opting out of releasing movies in HD-DVD, Toshiba had little choice.

For Sony, it can afford to breathe a welcome sigh of relief. They dodged a bullet and avoided going 0-2 in media format wars (its Beta format lost out to VHS in the previous round). But they can’t afford to relax too long. Blu-ray may be the victor here, but Sony may ultimately not have much to celebrate.

For starters, I doubt there will be a sudden upsurge in sales of Blu-ray DVD players. Most users will be content, for now, with their current DVD players. Only when the price of a Blu-ray player begins to approach what standard definition players cost today (under $100) is that likely to change.

On a related front: When I shifted from videotape to DVDs, I wound up repurchasing many of the movies I already owned in VHS. Doing so was worth it because the quality of the display and sound was so much better with DVDs. It was also a huge convenience to be able to skip almost instantly to any part of a movie (and not have to worry about rewinding). The added features that came with DVDs (such as deleted scenes and commentary tracks) were a bonus, although not critical ones for me.

I don’t expect to make a similar conversion to Blu-ray, even after I buy a Blu-ray player. First, many older movies will never be released in a true HD-quality version, because such quality will not be possible. Second, the improvement of the HD version over a standard DVD version is not enough to make it worth the cost (at least to me) of purchasing a second (or even third) version of the same movie. If studios had some trade-in policy (where you get a discounted version of a Blu-ray DVD by trading in your old standard DVD), I might be inclined to bite, but I don’t see this happening.

But all of this may well be moot. The DVD format, Blu-ray or otherwise, could be dead (or at least on life-support) before too long. It will take a few years, but it’s coming. Downloading movies is what will slay the DVD. The specifics are still a bit unclear, but my crystal ball sees a mash-up of the Rhapsody music service, the iTunes Store, Apple TV, and Netflix. Let’s call it TedFlix. I see it working something like this:

TedFlix will have a library that includes almost every film currently available (much like what the iTunes Store is today for music). Where an HD version of a movie exists, TedFlix will have both HD and standard definition versions of the movies. The HD version will be true 1080p. With devices similar to Apple TVs (let’s call them Ted TVs), you will be able to download the movie directly to your TV. With just slightly improved download speeds, you should be able to start watching the movie almost immediately after you click to rent it.

The rental period will be 72 hours. Further, you will be able to rent up to a maximum of three movies in any 24 hour period and up to a maximum of 60 movies a month. The cost? A monthly subscription fee of $24.95 (perhaps less if economics allow).

TedFlix, if successful, would effectively kill off most of the demand for Blu-ray discs, as well as the DVD rental business. There will likely be some market remaining for retail purchases of DVD packages (such as to give one as a gift). But the demand will be small.

Still, there may be a place where Blu-ray could survive, even thrive: Blu-ray DVD burners. Let’s include such a burner as part of each Ted TV unit. Why? Well, what if you want to watch all those “extras” that come on a purchased DVD, instead of just watching the movie? Or what if you want to be able to play a movie on a television other than the one to which your Ted TV is connected? Not a problem.

With TedFlix, you can optionally select to download and burn a complete DVD, an exact duplicate of what you would otherwise buy in a store. I foresee two variations here. In one case, the burned DVD only plays for 72 hours, and probably only plays on “authorized” devices (similar to how iTunes now works for purchased music). You pay a small fee (say $1.00) for each DVD that you choose to download and burn in this way. In the other case, you purchase the burned DVD (for a competitive price). It’s now yours forever and has no authorization restrictions. However, just as with a purchased DVD, you won’t be able to make copies of it. Admittedly, given the size capacity of Blu-ray DVDs, these burns may be impractical to do at current download speeds, but much faster connections are not too far off.

What about transferring movies to iPods and iPhones? I don’t quite have this worked out yet. But a model for doing this already exists in the iTunes Store; I am sure it can be adapted to work in TedFlix.

With TedFlix and Ted TV, you will be able to watch any movie you want, whenever you want—for just one monthly fee. Want to watch a movie for a second time, months after you first watched it? Just select it again. There’s no additional cost. And if movie technology improves, you’ll get the benefit of it, without having to repurchase your DVD library.

This may not be the future that Sony or the movie studios would prefer, but I doubt that will stop the train. I think I already hear the whistle in the distance. I certainly hope so.

Update: After writing this, I noticed that David Pogue also posted a column today on this topic. He takes a much more pessimistic view of downloaded movies. I don’t disagree with his assessment. However, he is talking about the present. I am talking about a hopeful future.