Digital Distribution Methods
From CreativeBusiness
Once you have made your digital media, you need to distribute it. Here are the most common methods
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Self hosting
Your ISP account for your website will usually include some amount of HTTP hosting for media files. While this gives you maximum control, check the details on your hosting agreement - you may have to pay extra if you exceed filesize or bandwidth quotas, or a suddenly successful work may get your hosting suspended for a period of time.
Web 2.0 sites
There are a broad range of sites that specialize in hosting specific media types for you, such as Photobucket and Flickr for photos, Viddler, Vimeo and YouTube for videos. Many of these already have broad user communities to discover your work, making them valuable for building the audience that you are distributing to. Many also have built-in tools to provide multiple versions of the files for different uses or platforms - for example iPod or mobile phone - which also expands your potential audience. Again, check terms in case you are subject to bandwidth caps, and pay attention to rights clauses int he terms of service in case the site wants a copyright assignment or publicity waiver.
Repository sites
Archive.org has less of a community and search aspect than Web 2.0 sites but is good for storing large files in particular (the high resolution versions of Where Are The Joneses episodes are stored there). Think of it as a noncommercial Amazon S3.
Commercial sites
Lulu and iTunes Music Store will host digital downloads. They enable you to charge and set people's expectations that they should pay for downloads.
Commodity hosting
The rise of services such as Amazon S3, which will host files for you for defined storage, bandwidth and connection fee is an intermediate alternative - some of the specialized sites are built on this underlying infrastructure.
Bittorrent
Bittorrent is a way to distribute popular files by pooling the bandwidth of the people who download them - this avoids the central server point of failure and concentrated billing problem, at the price of slightly less efficiency, and less guaranteed timely delivery.
This is from the Distribution models page, which I felt I'd rather misnamed. Could someone integrate it as required please?
See also the discussion page for p2p and Joost questions.
* New distribution methods
o P2P
o RSS enclosures (e.g. podcasts)
o distribution services (e.g. iTMS)
o bit torrent
o hosting sites (e.g. YouTube, Viddler)
o simple download (you bung it on your server)
* Contrasting the traditional methods of distributing creative products with the options emerging in the open environment?
o Music - producers can distribute digital files via iTMS (are they open now they offer non-DRM files?) and Myspace (can they ever be open?), or they could use someone like 7digital, state51 or bleep.com (although i know zilch about their practices), or there's a more DIY option (how-to-guide to setting up servers and payment mechanisms?). You could also establish a physical distribution network using online payment mechanisms and the good-old Royal Mail. Can we recommend p2p or torrent as a distribution method?
o Words - POD (e.g. Lulu, Blurb.com, plus others i'm sure)
o Film - Do we recommend p2p or torrent (with some kind of 'honest bar' approach) as a distribution method? Do we talk about Joost and other VoIP services here? - hm,
o Software - anything more to say than download?
