Online streaming supasses illegal file-sharing

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According to a study conducted by Music Ally’s media and technology researches, illegal file-sharing in the UK has fallen big time (yay!).

The study, which was published last Monday, showed that between December 2007 and January 2009, the number of people who regularly file-shared dropped by a quarter. The trend was most pronounced among 14-18 year olds.

It also showed that more and more teens are opting to steaming music and video sites such as YouTube, Spotify, MySpace, among others.

Researchers wrote: “Nearly twice as many 14-18-year-olds (31 per cent) listen to streamed music on their computer every day compared to music fans overall (18 per cent). More fans are regularly sharing burned CDs and Bluetoothing tracks to each other than file-sharing tracks.”

This move towards music and video streaming though has some uhm, negative effects in the internet.

According to Larry Roberts ( the guy who invented – yep – the ARPANet and packet switching), traditional packet-based routing is not built for streaming services which results to poor streaming qualities.

“Keeping up with bandwidth demand has required huge outlays of cash to build an infrastructure that remains underutilised,” he wrote. “To put it another way, we’ve thrown bandwidth at a problem that really requires a computing solution.”

Source:

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2009/gb20090713_439306.htm