How To Speed Up Movie Downloads?

Movie fanatics can not seem to get enough of watching movies. Oftentimes, however, video stores can not catch-up with movies being posted on the Internet. People now turn to the web to download the latest movies available.

Do not let the sophistication of the Internet fool you. In fact, because of the availability of different file formats, movies can now be played from Personal Computers (PCs), Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), and other smartphones. File conversion from one format to another is also available making it more convenient to download movies than to buy the latest DVD from a video store. Downloading a movie, however, can take time. To be able to speed up movie downloads, a number of factors must be taken into consideration. The speed of a movie download can be affected by the download rate and the upload rate of the movie source file.

The download rate of a dial-up connection to the Internet is very slow compared to that of a broadband Internet subscription service. A dial-up connection is enough for Internet surfing, audio streaming or chatting activities but is not advisable for movie downloads. For one, the connection is unstable and can disconnect anytime forcing you to restart the download. Also, the speed of download can take up to a day because of the very slow connection.

In the Internet, the downloading models in use is either a per-movie download with a fee of 3 to 4 dollars or a per-membership download with a fee of 30 to 50 dollars. The advantage of the per-membership model over the per-movie download is that it is a one-time payment, after which, a member is free to download any movies from its network of servers or members. Each member of the per-membership model is also encouraged to participate in a community sharing of movie files. We are actually talking about millions of movies for free.

It is possible to have more than one member downloading files from a server. In this regard, the uploading rate of the server can also have a negative effect on the length of download time. To speed up movie downloads, the movie file is divided into small parts and is housed to a number of servers in the network. It can then be downloaded simultaneously from different servers contributing to a faster download rate. The concept is known as segmented downloading or multi-source downloading.

A common example of the concept presented above is the BitTorrent protocol. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing communications protocol that is being adopted by file-sharing websites. Its main advantages is its low demand on networking hardware and bandwidth. Other similar file-sharing sytems include Swarmcast and KaZaA.

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