Digitaltopia

CacheLogic revealed the results an in depth early July study of of traffic on P2P networks recently. The statistics reveal some interesting results. It appears that Hollywood's worse nightmare may already be here. Video swapping now accounts for 61% of all traffic on the Bit Torrent, Emule, Gnutella, and Fast Track networks, with audio files now accounting for only 11% of total traffic. The remaining 27% of traffic is made up by things like CD images, and compresses archives.

Looking at the content swapped among audio files reveals some surprises. The open source Ogg format now accounts for 12% of all audio file swaps. However that 12% is almost exclusively in Asia, and nearly all swapped on Bit Torrent. MP3's still remain the dominate force accounting for 65% of all audio trades however. Microsoft's .WMA files round out the rest of the traffic.

Out of the 61% of file sharing traffic video swapping takes up, CacheLogic, reports nearly 75% of it Microsoft's video format. However I suspect CacheLogic is mistaken in this regard. I assume the are seeing most files have the .avi extension, and assuming they are a Microsoft's video format. I am nearly sure that most are actually use the open source Xvid codec, or Divx. 15% of the video traffic consisted of .mpeg's, and about 9% where .rm files.

Another surprising result of the study is that the ED2K network now seems to be the home of the most video trading. ED2K edges out the powerful Bit Torrent network for video downloads because the files are there for download so much longer. Once a file is released and spread on ED2K it tends to be around nearly forever, where with Bit Torrent files tend to die out after a few weeks or so.