A comment on Slashdot hit the nail on the head for a product/service I want to create:
Where *are* all the wonderful ‘independent’ movies and documentaries and such on the Internet these days? Back in the early 90’s, we predicted there’d be simply scads of new and entertaining film content available on the ‘net for perusal, but it seems like its either ‘movieflix’ or sites like silversow.com and demandmedia.net, none of which truly satisfies my urge to surf/download and watch good quality film media I got from the Internet.
Technology is coming together to allow for content distribution entirely via the Internet. Think of it as “Tivo over Ethernet.” It will be the next wave of media, and I hope to to position my surfboard on the sweet spot of this wave and have the ride of my life.
The tools are there. The demand is building. It’s only a matter of time.
Right now it is too expensive to host your own movies, or the red tape is too thick to have someone else host it. P2P isn’t really paying off for movies like we thought it would, and BitTorrent is only good for handling the initial onslaught of downloaders when something popular is first released. Until there are better hosting options for film makers, you are going to be waiting for all that great Indy content.
I’m hoping to put BitTorrent in a box. That’s the secret. It solves the bandwidth problem easily. And by putting some brains behind BitTorrent (think an appliance here), I can create multiple download paths on demand, creating that “initial onslaught” that can be used to better distribute the media. Now that work is done on customer demand (for instance, when someone wants to download the latest Red Hat). By wrapping some smarts around BitTorrent, this type of media can be shared efficiently and easily through hundreds of thousands of set-top boxes.
A “new release” of an independent film, for instance, could trigger these BitTorrent boxes to all grab a slice of it and then piece it together amongst themselves. This method could be used to distribute practically any content the same way.
It’s perfect. The set-top boxes are designed to be always on, and always on the Internet. They make perfect BitTorrent clients/servers. All I need is a good way of kicking off the chain reaction.