Blogtorrent

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- Blog Torrent, an improvement of BitTorrent specially designed for TV-like channels (later renamed the Broadcast Machine):

"Blog Torrent adds features to BitTorrent that make it much easier for people to ‘publish’ files. We’ve made a simple, web-based way to create a ‘torrent’ and upload it in a one step. We’ve also made it easier to install a ‘tracker’ which is necessary on the server side to connect everyone who’s sharing the files. This makes it much easier for video artists, documentarians, or anyone with a camcorder and iMovie, to share their video content on a blog or website. To this point, BitTorrent has been complicated enough that it hasn’t been adopted by artists, which means that most of the content people are sharing is being posted by people who didn’t make it themselves, mostly Hollywood movies and TV shows. But what’s exciting about peer-to-peer is that it’s a free distribution method for people who could never afford distribution. With Blog Torrent, anyone can share what they make and that means totally new alternatives to mainstream media, in this case, television. We ultimately want to see internet “TV Channelsâ€? that download video in the background and let you watch at your convenience (a TiVo for the internet).

I know we’re probably talking intuition rather than hard data here, but what is your sense of the potential audience for Blog Torrent (I mean content creators), and why? Is there any particular experience you’ve had which made you think “We have to do this and it is going to be huge.â€?

I think the audience is very, very broad and varied. I have friends, for example, that make artistically serious video work but have never considered offering it online, because it was never practical for them. I hope Blog Torrent will let them jump in. I also expect documentary filmmakers will love this technology– they can make a name for themselves if they’re new, or they can share extra footage and full-length interviews, they can offer old content that they aren’t selling anymore, and I bet they’ll even start to share first-run material for everyone who doesn’t live near an independent cinema. People who make videos and movies always want people to see it and there’s hundreds or thousands of times more content being created than gets out through mainstream channels. Not only that, but the number of content producers is set to explode: video has finally become practical on the desktop and small, hard-drive camcorders are right around the corner. We called it “Blog Torrentâ€? – forgoing our original, and much cooler name “Battle Torrentâ€? – because it makes sharing video as easy as blogging text or photos and, in doing so, might be able to do in the video world what blogs have done in the news world (or more). And whether it’s our software or someone else’s, I think TV is about to face more serious competition than they would ever imagine. There are too many talented people out there that have no space on the dial. And access to television channels is much narrower in terms of access than music, books, newspapers, or magazines– that means new pressures on the system could be even greater when things open up." (http://broadbanddaily.gigaom.com/archives/2004/12/06/seeds-of-change-nicholas-reville-on-downhill-battles-blog-torrent-initiative/)

Good French-language summary of P2P TV, in particular the distribution of TV series through Blog Torrent, at http://www.futura-sciences.com/sinformer/n/news5076.php