BitTorrent & RSS Video Feeds

Just been reading about a very interesting P2P technology - BitTorrent.

What is BitTorrent?

You have a great product, many customers, and are delivering your product to hordes of happy customers online. Serving large files creates problems of scaling, flash crowds, and reliability. As you grow, they become more central to your business, but your bandwidth costs go up as well. It's a vicious cycle.

There is a solution. BitTorrent is a simple software product which addresses all of these problems.

The key to cheap file distribution is to tap the unutilized upload capacity of your customers. It's free. Their contribution grows at the same rate as their demand, creating limitless scalability for a fixed cost.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer protocol for distributing files. It makes use of the upstream bandwidth of every downloader to increase the effectiveness of the distribution as a whole, and to gain advantage on the part of the downloader. On average, the faster you upload to your peers, the faster you will be able to download.

Read why some people think BitTorrent might be a 'game-changer'. Another example is Swarmcast.

Tie this form of peer-to-peer file sharing to a net ready PVR (Tivo) and RSS style video feeds, it should be possible to create your own ideal TV schedule. A network of one! (Perhaps I should trademark that sentance..)

There is a very interesting article about The Future of Television on Grant Henninger's blog. He also has a recent post Further Designs for TV's Future where he discusses his recent conversations with James Seng.

(This book, The Aula Exposure: From Friction to Freedom, looks like a good starting point to understand what may be happening in this digital networked age. To quote from the Aula website:

The Aula Exposure: From Friction to Freedom book is ready. The talks and discussions from the Aula Meeting of Minds ’03 event, along with selected essays, are now bound in hardcover.

The central argument of the book is that as different areas of culture start flowing in digital networks, it becomes self-defeating for artists, publishers, labels, and also regular people to insist for control over the distribution of their own creations. Although the fact is simple, its repercussions are only starting to be understood in their full complexity. At Aula, we’ve started referring to these economic, social and legal repercussions as the “exposure” of art, ideas, and everyday life.

Contributors include Marko Ahtisaari, John Perry Barlow, Tom Coates, Cory Doctorow, Jyri Engeström, Dan Gillmor, Jim Griffin, J.C. Herz, Joichi Ito, Matt Jones, Alex Nieminen, Abbas Raza, Clay Shirky, Eric Wahlforss, and Kim Weckström.)