Alloy Media 2008 College Student Study

Alloy Media just published their 8th annual College Explorer study with some interesting results. The study was conducted online for Alloy within the United States by Harris Interactive. This September 13.6 million college students (ages 18-30) are predicted to arrive on campuses and bring $237 billion in spending (a 20% increase from last year) with them. Here's some detail on some of the mobility gadgets students will be bringing back to school with them next month:

7 in 10 students now own a laptop (a 67% increase in three years), with desktop ownership dropping 34% over the last three years.

Ownership of MP3 players has increased, with 67% of students now owning one and using it for more than just music. 23% are now watching downloadable videos on the “small” screen.

The cell phone, once a utility for getting in touch with friends and family, is now favored by a growing number of students who use it as their all-in-one device for communication, entertainment and web access.

The way television is viewed on campus is changing too:

62% of students report watching TV online.

26% are choosing to visit the various major networks websites 34% are opting for YouTube.

Others emerging platforms on campuses include Veoh, Hulu, and Joost.

I also found the politics portion of the study interesting:

90% are planning to cast their presidential vote in November. 43% state that they’re “Pro-Obama.”

Candidates’ presence on social networking sites became just as vital as a campus town hall with 88% of students (up from 73% just last year) reporting engagement with social media, including visiting social networking websites, video websites like YouTube, and blogs.

Also with regards to social networking - 81% of students have created a social networking profile - popular activities reported include posting web applications, with 39% doing so, and almost one-third posting videos.

You can read more about the study here.

Traffic Shaping: BitTorrent and P2PTV

Lately there's been a lot of press about Internet Service Provider (ISP) traffic shaping with much of the discussion focused on BitTorrent based applications. Let's take a look at BitTorrent and how it is being used to distribute large files on the Internet. I'll use content from a Free Press piece published last fall to describe the steps involved for a user to start using BitTorrent:

Step 1: A user first downloads a program known as a BitTorrent client. Popular bit torrent clients (there are many) include uTorrent, BitComet and ABC. Once a BitTorrent client is installed the user can then share and download files.

Step 2: Once the client is installed, users can then search for interesting content. The user then finds a “torrent,” which is a miniscule file that serves to point a user’s computer in the direction of that file’s location. The torrent contains data that identify the file or files to be downloaded and a tracker notifying the computer coordinating such file distribution (many also utilize a trackerless system in which each connected computer acts as a tracker) that another user is interested in obtaining the file. All the rest of the BitTorrent users currently downloading or possessing the file (through keeping their application open, known as “seeding”) help transmit small portions of the overall file to the requesting user.

Step 3: As the user begins to acquire portions of the overall file, their computer redistributes the content to other users also requesting the file. The BitTorrent protocol differs from traditional point to point P2P networks where a central server distributes the information to each user, thereby putting all the strain on a single source.

Since it was released in 2001, BitTorrent has been the focus of some bad press because it can be used to illegally distribute copyrighted content. Things are changing though - BitTorrent applications also allow original content creators to not incur the entire cost of hardware, hosting and bandwidth - potentially providing huge savings to networks selling video content, record companies selling music, companies selling software.

One of my favorite BitTorrent "like" applications is Joost. Joost uses Peer-to-Peer television (P2PTV) to legally distribute content. We've all watched video streams (YouTube is a good example) where the video is streamed off a server - nice but relatively low resolution. Joost (requires an install of a separate application and does not run in a web browser) uses P2PTV to deliver high resolution video by having each client running it propagate the stream to more downstream clients. This moves the distribution costs from the channel owner to the user.

Later this week I'll write about technology that can be used to shape this kind of traffic on a network.