ANOTHER Legitimate Peer to Peer Video Download Service?
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.
