At the moment, people downloading videos, games and other content from the PlayStation Store do so using a direct connection to the servers at Sony. Ultimately, this means downloads can be on the slow side and can take an awful long time to complete (and that’s before the installation).
However, some news inside Gran Turismo 5 Prologue reveals that this might be about to change.
The other day, GT5 Prologue received a hefty update which improved online play, added new music and backgrounds for the menu screens, fiddled with the handling model a little, sped up download times for updates and launched the video-on-demand Gran Turismo TV service.
GTTV bundles together automotive documentaries on the world of cars (featuring insights into development of cars and tours of factories, etc) as well as motorsport from Japan and episodes of TV shows such as the Japanese motoring show Best Motoring and the UK programme Top Gear. Some content is free, but the commercial content retails for 69p/99ยข for a 2 week rental period.
Currently, the downloads are performed with a direct link to Sony’s PlayStation Network servers, meaning videos are downloaded using a direct HTTP connection. This means that downloads are nippy when nobody else is using them, but otherwise they chug along at a pedestrian pace. After the recent update download speeds have been improved (and background downloading is supported from inside the game as you play; GT5P is one of the first games to support this feature) but Sony and Polyphony plan to take this a step further, as far as I can see.
One option added to Prologue’s Network Options menu is called “Advanced Download”. Selecting it gives you a short explanation of the Advanced Download option, essentially describing it as uploading the GTTV content you already have while you’re downloading another. This is the underlying principle of peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent, and is used for other video download services such as the BBC iPlayer.
What does it mean though? Head on over to page two for a hopefully-rather-simple explanation, and why it’s good news for PSN downloads.
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If I remember correctly MGO already uses P2P for updates. Has the potential to be great but I don’t know how well it’ll work in the real world of consoles, rather then someone running Azureus or uTorrent on their PC.
As everybody already knows, Konami made more screw ups then you could count with MGO so I’ll wait to see other companies doing stuff with P2P before passing judgement, but I always found the http downloads to be faster.
Ever since the Bioshock demo was released I’ve always been curious about how the XBLA downloads work. It’s not P2P but it exhibits some of the behaviour of a high demand, single seed torrent.
Not sure how wonderful this is… Attempting to download the MGO update via P2P was nearly impossible. I gave up after a half hour of three percent completion (even though it was the recommended method) and downloaded the entire patch from Konami in 15 minutes… Maybe Sony will implement this effectively but right now I’d have to pass on being excited.
P2P is a doubled-edged sword. It’s great for people late to the party, but it doesn’t do the very first downloaders any good at all. (Chances are most people are likely to want to be the first, rather than late)
3 Keith K
Xbox live already uses P2P, and not too many people complain. The service wont get any worse than it is now, it will just get faster as more people get it.
@Keith
You know they could do it like bliz, have a dedicated HTTP or FTP link but the more users there are the less the server is used.
“and background downloading is supported from inside the game as you play, a PS3 first”
Singstar has been doing this since December.
Yeah, but I’m not exactly a hardcore Singstar player, mainly because I enjoy retaining my dignity.
Shhhhh….