the bittorrent effect

[somedaybitch]

an interesting article at wired.com discusses bittorrent and how it has essentially turned the internet into the world's tivo for free. the surface issues of piracy are of course addressed, but what's interesting about this article is that it also touches on the ramifications of bittorrent to television and film from a content provider standpoint. to wit:

One example of how the world has already changed: Gary Lerhaupt, a graduate student in computer science at Stanford, became fascinated with Outfoxed, the documentary critical of Fox News, and thought more people should see it. So he convinced the film's producer to let him put a chunk of it on his Web site for free, as a 500-Mbyte torrent. Within two months, nearly 1,500 people downloaded it. That's almost 750 gigs of traffic, a heck of a wallop. But to get the ball rolling, Lerhaupt's site needed to serve up only 5 gigs. After that, the peers took over and hosted it themselves. His bill for that bandwidth? $4. There are drinks at Starbucks that cost more. "It's amazing - I'm a movie distributor," he says. "If I had my own content, I'd be a TV station."

that's what they should be worried about. just as blogs have broken MSM's stranglehold on news, so too will bittorrent, and its ancestors, break "hollywood's" stranglehold on film and television.

indy, they're digging in the wrong place.