BitTorrent - Classic Disruptive Technology

What we’re facing now is not a concern about content, but about the methods to deliver the content. BitTorrent is the logical answer, and as a company, it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with.

blackrimglasses.com » Blog Archive » Finally a movie store that answers the bandwidth question

Ethans post matches my current thoughts on the rapidly escalating move to HD and the difficulties of providing content via a shiny disk.

With the current confusion in the market over which of the last physical distribution media will win (Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) consumers are left in the lurch without a clue as to which format to opt for.

The future is obviously downloadable content but available bandwidth is still a concern. Not so much the pipe into peoples homes as this will increase over time but from the source. The distribution of many copies of a HD movie or TV show from a single source doesn't scale very well without huge fat tubes at the central distribution point but even that is no guarantee of a good downloading experience.

BitTorrent and the implementation of the swarm technology enables enormous increases in download capacity by moving the distribution mechanism out into the cloud and letting each participant share the already downloaded parts of a file out to other downloaders. This parallel distribution of the many parts is the way of the future once the industry starts to harness the power of such distributed downloading and moves away from the concept that BitTorrent is bad and just for pirates.

Now imagine a vendor with the courage and vision to embrace the BitTorrent culture and have the clout and respect to bring the Studios and TV companies on board...

Imagine a vendor making enormous inroads into new areas of consumer electronics...

Imagine a vendor with millions of pre-installed clients across both Windows and Macs....

Imagine a vendor with a state of the art existing online store already implemented selling music, TV shows and Movies....

Imagine a vendor with a new operating system in development with some top secret features yet to be announced....

Hey Apple, how's the iTV and iTunes 8 coming along.

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