[LINK] $60 million music piracy operation

[Chirgwin, Richard]

Oops ... no slight meant Robin, in case I put myself badly ... RC

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robin Whittle [mailto:rw at firstpr.com.au]
> Sent: Monday, 28 April 2003 14:54
> To: Link mailing list
> Cc: Chirgwin, Richard
> Subject: Re: [LINK] $60 million music piracy operation
> 
> 
> Hi Richard,
> 
> I totally agree this $60M stuff is pie-in-the-sky stuff.  My 
> message was
> at a tangent to the discussion, not in any way disagreeing with the
> seeming impossibility of any small outfit doing enough business with
> physical discs to be scaled to that value.  
> 
> Maybe if they did quite a lot of downloads, but still that's a lot.  
> 
> A 1 hour CD is 60 Megabytes as an MP3 download.  $60M is 2 million CDs
> at $30 each - worth is 120,000 Gigabytes.  Over 3 months that's 40,000
> Gigabytes a month.  At 80% utilisation, that means a link which does
> 50,000 Gigs a month flat out, which is . . . 154Mbps.
> 
> The lowest cost bandwidth I know is 400 Gigs for USD$100:
> 
>    http://www.rackshack.net
> 
> and that is in Texas.  The cost here would be vastly higher.  At the
> Rackshack rate, via downloads, a CD costs the server USD$0.015 so as a
> business it could be a nice little earner - but I just question the
> number of downloads.  Maybe they counted "hits" as CD 
> downloads and the
> site was one of those pernicious things which looks like the 
> inside of a
> casino and uses dozens of files tiled for each major graphic.
> 
>  - Robin
>