[p2p-research] what about archive.org as an alternative to youtube?

[Dan Brickley]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 3:54 AM, Samuel Rose <samuel.rose at gmail.com> wrote:
> We used to have some friends that recorded our live music shows and
> uploaded to archive.org
>
> Archive.org could use some help in the coming years creating a way to
> massively distribute it's archive, in my opinion. They will eventually
> run out of space and resources on their existing servers. Other than
> that  theoretical issue, I think archive.org personally is an awesome
> place to post videos (would still allow you to embed as easily as
> youtube does)

With storage costs dropping still, even though it's counter-intuitive,
centralisation can be quite attractive.

There's a Brewster Kahle talk on video up there somewhere, where he
says something like that you could have textual scans of every book
ever written in a server farm that costs less than the price of a
house. And talking with TV colleagues yesterday, that a very major
national TV archive (albeit in low-ish resolution) would fit in a
not-so-intimidating number of terrabytes.

So in general I'm all for distributed, decentralised, replicated and
all that. But it is very easy to forget the benefits that come with a
centralised approach, and also the amazing things that are possible as
technologies get cheaper. And of course it's not an either-or
situation. You could have a few archive.org-like supernodes with
different focus, collections etc, and still build a p2p distribution
system.

Anyhow if you're interested in doing things with TV content from
archive.org, I recently blogged a howto. Their metadata can be crawled
but it's not so obvious without help. Some of the archive.org staff
helped me understand what to do, so I stitched their email
explanations together to make this post:
http://danbri.org/words/2010/10/27/565

cheers,

Dan