BitTorrent Question...

Marc Canter has posted a post from the Digital Music Weblog on his site. The original post talks about how BitTorrent has really gotten powerful over the last few years... and the original author asks: "How soon before youÂ’ll be able-with one click-download every prime-time TV show or last yearÂ’s top 500 CDs in one click?!"

My answer: Not too far off in the future... Here is a really powerful idea that has had me thinking for weeks... the integration of RSS and BitTorrent. I clearly didn't have the original idea to integrate RSS and BitTorrent, but the power could be unreal. Imagine that you signed up for an RSS feed for every Friends episode ever posted on Suprnova.org. With the integration of RSS and BitTorrent you could easily within a week have every episode... although illegally. So to answer the original question of "How soon before you can download every prime-time TV show or last year's top 500 CDs in one click?"... I think we are not more than months away from the fundamentally having the software ready, thquestionon is who will take the time to put together the actual packages.

Now for the fun question.... when will Hollywood and the Music industry wake up to the power of BitTorrent. I know for a fact that they monitor the large BitTorrent sites, and since IP addresses are exposed while you are downloading data, it is easy to track down users. (A friend of mine got a nasty email from MIT telling them that a hollywood studio was going to seek prosecution if he kept downloading movies). But while they simply monitor the activity on the major Torrents, when will they try and utilize the technology (which is incredibly powerful at distributing files in high demand and large file size) to distribute data for services such as MovieLink? It is time for Hollywood to take a cutting edge technology, embrace it, and utilize it for the good of consumers and their own benefit...