Ntro’s Official Opinion

Last weekend, Family Guy returned to network television. As a fan of the show, I Tivoed it and watched it that evening. A friend, whose single-tuner Tivo-a-like was occupied by Desperate Housewives, missed it. When he came to me with this sob story, I simply replied “Just download it.” “Huh?” he says, “You mean on the Internets? Where?” Keep in mind, this friend is by no means a Luddite. He’s a regular Nintendo-playing, slashdot-reading, blackberry-having, caffeine-addicted geek, yet he was not familiar with tvtorrents.com or BitTorrent. I won’t dwell too much on my disappointment in him over this, but I will remind you that BitTorrent accounts for one-third of all data transmitted on the Internet, so if you’re not down with BT, start paying attention.

This friend downloaded his Family Guy episode, and decided to do a little reading on what this “BitTorrent” thing is all about. In his research, he discovered that Azureus has an RSS plugin. BitTorrent, unlike most file transfer mechanisms, performs best when there is high demand for a resource, because the load is distributed across all clients, including the ones that have not completed the download. Through RSS, a feed provider can announce a new resource to all subscribers as soon as it available, thereby immediately creating high demand for the file, and fast downloads for all. BitTorrent’s biggest weakness is the inability to view partial content, thus making it suboptimal for on-demand videos, since you can’t start watching the video until you’ve finished downloading it. That’s what makes RSS and BitTorrent such a happy couple– if configured properly, files can be downloaded as they are announced (say, in the middle of the night or while you are at work), and will be complete by the time you are ready to watch them, eliminating the need to stream content.

Back to my friend’s story. He instantly realized the potential implications of Really Simple Syndication of his favorite weekly television programs, but what he realized was only the tip of the iceberg. I gave him a little clue: “If you really want to see the future, check out Torrentocracy.” That sealed the deal.

He gets it, and if you’ve been following the links, you do too. Just in case you haven’t been paying attention, I’ll spell it out for you: With Bittorrent and RSS, one can easily create an internet-based periodical broadcast of huge files with almost zero distribution cost. With MythTV and Torrentocracy, one can create a set-top box such as a Tivo or VCR that consumes such a broadcast. This concept is a few years old, but it’s finally picking up steam. See Broadcatching.

It’s possible to replace (or complement) your satellite receiver and DVD player with a cheap PC running MythTV, and still stay up to date on Desperate Housewives.

Most popular TV programs are available via BitTorrent within hours (sometimes minutes) of their debut. That’s not revolutionary– Tivo has provided that ability (sans BitTorrent) for years. What makes this device (I’ll call it a Media Station) truly revolutionary is this: Not only will this Media Station be able to download scheduled network programs, it will be able to download multimedia content from any feed to which you decide to subscribe. That includes music, movies, and clips of guys getting kicked in the nuts.

If multimedia content costs literally nothing to distribute, and there is a brain-dead simple method of subscribing to that content, some interesting things become possible.

Imagine if:

• The local softball/football/basketball/bowling league provides a video feed of the week’s games. You could come home at the end of the day and watch some real local sporting action.
• You provide a semi-private (password protected) feed of your family photos and videos. Your parents subscribe, and they have something more interesting to watch than Everybody Loves Raymond.
• Your church provides a feed of weekly sermons or lessons or announcements. Would it be so bad to be greeted by a thirty-second video of your pastor every once in a while? Would you watch it if it was automatically delivered to your TV?
• A dozen or a hundred more shows like Red Vs Blue pop up. As costs continue to go down, more people will be producing entertainment like this. Machinima will be a big factor in this.
• The movie/music studios finally catch on and start distributing their content via this system.

Are you beginning to see the magnitude of the implications of this technology? Is its importance starting to become apparent? Can you smell the coming revolution? This is a lot bigger than Family Guy, folks. This has the potential to shift paradigms that have been firmly in place since the invention of the VCR.

I know, I know. “Don’t get too excited about this, Ntro, no one can predict the future, so how do you know any of this will happen?” I’ll respond to that with a quote from science fiction author William Gibson:

The future has arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.