Jeff Richards' Demand Insights

BitTorrent announced today it has reached licensing deals with several major studios and content providers to establish a legitimate consumer offering for content. To anyone who is actively involved in the broadband content space, this is compelling news - BitTorrent's technology is widely utilized by illegal filesharing networks and consumer download services.

From my vantagepoint, the "story behind the story" is twofold:

1) There are now numerous legitimate, secure video content sites on the Internet that are leveraging P2P technology - including AOL, BBC, Channel 4 and Sky - all of whom use VeriSign's P2P platform (all are DRM-enabled, secure and network-efficient). It's great to have BitTorrent join the crowd - and it will be interesting to watch the company's site compete with the major media players.

2) The attention the announcement is grabbing is a good thing - driving additional high profile news coverage around the fact that PEER TO PEER TECHNOLOGY IS BEING INCREASINGLY ACKNOWLEDGED AS THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO DISTRIBUTE RICH MEDIA CONTENT ON THE INTERNET (for more on this, download our white paper on the subject) and increasingly being considered "mainstream."

Several knowledgeable media outlets and blog sites had interesting posts on the subject, including GigaOM, Matthew Ingram, and ZDNet.

Posted by Jeff Richards at 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I saw Greg Norman's book in the airport book store, I thought - golf, business, and wine - sounds like a solid combination to me. An entertaining read if you like golf, but not the most well-written book I've ever read. If you're interested in Norman and/or how he built his $300M+ empire, and can ignore some weak writing, it's worth the relatively quick read.

Posted by Jeff Richards at 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's hard to escape the attention focused on user generated content and the explosion of video on the Internet. Little known to many observers, however, is the correlated growth in use of video on demand by Fortune 500 corporations. As featured in an article by Bobby White in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday the 13th, companies like General Motors and Coca Cola are using VeriSign's peer to peer platform to distribute high quality video internally and externally.

GM head of Communications Len Marsico is quoted as saying "GM now uses the P2P technology daily to 'deliver a five-minute broadcast to our plants, offices and dealers' in Latin America. He adds that P2P's 'bad rap' wasn't a concern because of the cost savings and how it helped ease network capacity."

The article also features Coca Cola, saying "Coke also implemented a P2P communication service last year. Until recently, the service was restricted to delivering companywide messages from senior executives, but engineers have since added a "narrowcasting" function to the service. The new feature lets Coke decide on the size of a video audience, allowing it more flexibility to send video messages between small business units or for all employees, says Adam Brown, Coke's director of digital communications."

"We get such tremendous value out of the service," says Mr. Brown. Coke's P2P service is provided by Verisign's Kontiki business, which Mr. Brown says "is reputable so there was no thought to [P2P's] bad rep,"

Look for more announcements soon from Fortune 500 leaders using video to increase effectiveness within the corporation...

Posted by Jeff Richards at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)