André here, from TVTonic, the video aggregator featured in Windows Media Center's Online Spotlight. I have contacted many of you about having listed your feeds in our directory. The TVTonic client uses Microsoft BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) to download video content. Videobloggers seeing traces of BITS in their stats could possibly be seeing TVTonic users pulling their videos, however they could also be coming from other RSS clients, such as the RSS reader built in to IE7 which uses BITS.
See http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2006/02/02/522642.aspx BITS is the technology that Microsoft uses to deliver Windows Automatic Updates. As Markus said, it is a component designed to control and throttle background downloads as not to make any large resource hit on a user's computer. But the problem, it seems, with BITS is that it makes a substantial number of webserver requests. If you look at your server log you might think that BITS is hammering your bandwidth because of the high number of requests. This is because it is making requests to the server for small chunks of a file rather than one request for the whole file itself. Once it has collected all of the bits of a file, it marks it as being finished and makes the file available to the user. We have actually started to see several servers block requests from the BITS useragent. Revision3's servers (Diggnation & Systm), as well as Channel Frederator, to name a few. Recently we've started to see some strange messages get returned from libsyn. FYI – we are contacting the blip developers to see if there is a way we can work together to ensure their users are receiving less confusing stats. I'll keep everyone posted. I hope that clarifies this BITS issue for many of you. Please feel free to contact me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] if you have more questions. Sincerely, André Sala TVTonic Team Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
