Dear Obama: Use BitTorrent for your Fireside podcasts

Calling for the separation of Google and State.

The news that President-elect Barack Obama will be using YouTube to distribute his weekly "radio" address has been met by general fanfare among the digerati.

This might seem like a bold move--and compared with the relatively boring podcast MP3s of Bush's weekly speech hosted at Whitehouse.gov, it is. However, putting President-elect Obama's video podcasts on YouTube is hardly Change We Can Believe In.

By exclusively hosting his videos at YouTube, the Google-owned dominant player in the user-generated video industry, the Obama campaign has effectively issued its first no-bid giveaway of the next administration.

If Obama really wants to demonstrate his Web 2.0 bona fide intent and prove that he's actually interested in shaking things up, he'll use BitTorrent, the disruptive file-sharing tool that arguably dwarfs YouTube in popularity.

Let's explore a few reasons why Obama should ditch his YouTube plans and switch to BitTorrent:

• As demonstrated by the recent flood of constituent complaints to the House and Senate during the banking bailout, the .gov network simply can't deal with lots of traffic.
• It's not the government's role to pick industry winners and losers. Sure, YouTube has millions of users, but I'm sure that the other Silicon Valley-based user-submitted video sites would love to draw the eyeballs of Obama's podcast subscribers. What about Veoh, Vuze, Hulu, Revver, and Blip.tv?

• While it's awfully nice of Google-YouTube to volunteer the hundreds of gigabytes of bandwidth necessary to host Obama's video content, is it really appropriate to further expand the link between Google and the Obama Whitehouse?
  
  Google CEO Eric Schmidt already has Obama's ear as a member of his economic advisory board; the Obama campaign has likely paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Google for AdWords advertising during the campaign; and Google.org's Sonal Shah has landed a key key role on Obama's transition committee. Simply put, things are already close enough between Change.gov and the Google Gang.
• There are no copyright issues--since the videos will be made by the federal government, they are automatically in the public domain. Thus, it is perfectly OK for them to be shared via peer-to-peer technologies.
• It'd give Obama a reason to care about Net neutrality. Some on the left are already voicing fears that Obama will soften on his commitment to the Net neutrality cause. Once his weekly addresses are hosted via BitTorrent, he'll have a vested interest in keeping the pipes tamper free. In such a scenario, any antifile-sharing shenanigans by Comcast or other ISPs would directly impact Obama's ability to speak to the people.

• The Canadians already do it: CBC--Canada's version of PBS--has had highly successful trials of BitTorrent as a low cost, high-throughput method of distributing video content. Since we're hopefully going to copy the Canadian's obviously better health care system, why not similarly learn from their use of file sharing?

The time is right for the U.S. government to adopt BitTorrent. Mr. Obama, be bold, be brave, and upload to The Pirate Bay.

A tip of the hat to Aaron Shaw, who inspired this blog post in a conversation earlier today.

[kojacked]

This would be great for geeks but most folks don't know what a torrent is or how to access it. YouTube is a much more known quantity to folks and typically readily accessible to most right out of the box. I agree selecting YouTube does promote government favoritism but until BitTorrent is more readily available (read: installable, manageable, point-click-shippable with little user intervention) to grandma this suggestion sounds more like the wet dreams of some tech head than anything else.

[OStrolphant]

I don't know. Bit Torrent is so easy to use. It is just an install and then search on a website. if you have the know how to install a new browser or really anything technical competency greater than checking your email you can Torrent. The problem with Torrenting is justifying the download of the program. This is a small inconvenience that some people find to be a hurdle.

But then again LOTS of people did Bearshare and Limewire, same idea sort of possibly even harder to use. The biggest technical difficulty with both types of programs is saving and finding your files where you want.

And Grandma is the average computer user. In fact grandma is more than likly not a computer user. BitTorrent is not trying to make people into hardcore computer users. It is more than capable of reaching out to the average user, it just needs to make its name known.

[kojacked]

"if you have the know how to install a new browser or really anything technical competency greater than checking your email you can Torrent."

And there-in lies the problem. Ok maybe not Grandma won't YouTube but how about those "real Americans" at the Palin rallies? They may know how to shoot a gun but I doubt they'll be able to do much more on a computer than to check email or watch videos on YouTube.

[OStrolphant]

Yeah, not now, but people are becoming more and more proficient in computing and stuff is getting easier and easier, relatively. Hopefully soon peer-to-peer will become understood by everyone soon. It is optimistic and IF Obama does broadcast in this method maybe i could even accelerate the process of helping people use computers to their fullest extent.

who knows...like george_ou says, the YouTube video is always at least one less click away than a torrent and usually faster. Sucks.

[george_ou]

Chris, there's a major difference between BitTorrent and YouTube.

When you post a video on YouTube, people can go to the link from their web browser and start watching the video within 3 seconds or so as the video is being downloaded.

When you post a .Torrent file, we can assume person already has a BitTorrent client istalled and knows how to use it and we assume there are dedicated seeds that never go away, you don't get to start watching until the entire video is downloaded because it's coming to you out-of-order.

Granted, we can make the BitTorrent version much higher quality so it would be nice to have a .Torrent as an option for people, but I suspect that most people just want the instant gratification of clicking and watching.

[GooseGaggle]

In addition to the immediacy of youtube, it allows for the easy embedding and spreading of content. I don't see why the government doesn't have their own dedicated video site. Kind of like PBS, or NPR for the web. Or more simply, why they can't host the videos on whitehouse.gov like the bush mp3's?

Either way... i feel the less the general public knows about bittorrent the longer geeks will be able to have fun with it.

[UITD]

Dear Obama, Where is your fulfillment of the requirements to serve as the President of the United States laid out in Article II, Section I of The United States Constitution? You know, the documents that you have flat our refused to provide.... Obama continues to refuse to provide the media with school records, passports, college theses, law school records, law firm clients, medical records, Illinois State Senate files, and other documents about his record:

Original birth certificate - not released
Obama/Dunham marriage license - not released
Soetoro/Dunham marriage license - not released
Soetoro adoption records - not released
Besuki School application - released
Punahou School records - not released
Selective Service Registration - released
Occidental College records - not released
Passport (Pakistan) - not released
Columbia College records - not released
Columbia thesis - not released
Harvard College records - not released
Harvard Law Review articles - none
Baptism certificate - none
Medical records - not released
Illinois State Senate records - none
Illinois State Senate schedule ? not released (alleged to have been lost)
Law practice client list - not released
University of Chicago scholarly articles - none

And the fleecing of the American people continues.

[kojacked]

Somebody didn't take their happy pills today...

[Mikebanks]

Why urge anyone to "Bitterent' (misspelled intentionally) anything? Bittnerent has become a synonym and a symbol for ripped-off content. Including books.

Besides, though it may be "cool," bitterrent isn't any easier to use than YouTube.

[sebastien.kalonji]

Why should Obama use bittorent for his vids? Nobody uses bittorent besides those in search of the latest new films for free. Bittorent users don't care about Obama's speeches as they can download them everywhere where they want for free. My bet bittorent users will even watch the vids on youtube instead of bittorent.

[jonathan_dugan]

LegalTorrents has distributed over 750 TB of content since we started in 2003. The stereotype you present for Bittorrent use is not accurate. We offer sponsor-supported downloads of independent and creative commons licensed content, as well as select public domain content.



We're hosting the video here:
http://beta.legaltorrents.com/torrents/255-weekly-address-nov-15-2008

[mrcockrell]

i cant believe you are actually comparing bittorent to youtube..... you actually wrote an article about this... im actually embarrassed for you...

your confused why the president would choose to use the most widely used source of videos n the net? seriously?...

I have no idea why you are even comparing youtube to bittorrent. Youtube takes a couple of clicks to start a video, while for bit torrent, you have to find the actual .torrent, download it ALL and view it on an installed client. Doesn't even compare for the average Palin mum or grandpa who may like to watch.

On the other hand why doesn't Obama's team post the video on every website they can, this includes Youtube, Veoh, Vuze, Hulu, Revver, Blip.tv AND a nice .torrent for the nerdy folks like us out there. Why have only one site and not all, that would surely increase the video's public audience.

I completely disagree on having the video hosted only on the goverment network as it is not reliable enough (remember the bailout package, when the network crashed). Hosting it on all the other sites and embedding it at the whitehouse.gov site is a good idea though.

I just checked obama's latest address and it wasn't hosted on Youtube only, but it was on Yahoo, AOL and MSN video sites as well. So its not like the Obama team are trying to increase traffic for Google's Youtube or something.

Come on give the man a break. He did something great for the Internet generation by going online with a video of his address. The author of this article should give credit where it is due.

[Suspect987]

This article is not meant to compare Youtube to Bittorrent. What I believe Chris is trying to do is give President Obama a Net Neutral option for streaming his Podcasts. The problem with President Obama using Youtube is that it directly affects Google's bottom line. Their stock will go up due to this, had he chosen to stream his Podcasts on all available outlets or through Bittorent and not one source this would not be the case. Chris is right to point out, ?the Obama campaign has effectively issued its first no-bid giveaway of the next administration.? Google-Youtube will reap the benefits while Veoh, Vuze, Hulu, Revver, and Blip.tv sit by without the opportunity to benefit from this opportunity.

As other posters have pointed out there is a bit more technical know-how required in using Bittorent. I would expect President Obama would have little problem using this as a way to enable the American people to increase their computer literacy. The easier solution would be, to steal a term from President Obama, ?Redistribute the Wealth? and distribute President Obama?s podcast to all online media outlets. While this may not happen, it should. If not put it up for auction to the lowest bidder like all government contracts. I?m pretty sure every site would do it for free do to the increase they would have in visitors.