cryptochrome's Journal: The Future of the MPAA is BitTorrent

Much has been made of the MPAA's legal attack on BitTorrent Trackers. But I doubt they'll ever take action against Bram Cohen per se. Number one, because they know they don't have a legal leg to stand on - they might as well sue the creator of ftp. And of course since BitTorrent is not a network there is no one to sue there. Nevertheless if they wanted to they could send in their most expensive lawyers and trap the BT software and Bram in the courts.

But more importantly, they surely realize that the efficiency of BitTorrent or BitTorrent-like protocols could make Video-On-Demand substantially cheaper to deliver and allow for far more content to be offered at once. Stifling it would just make them look bad and lose access to time-tested existing code and expertise to help develop their own system.

They just need some updated PVR-type hardware to handle the actual movie-finding, file-sharing, billing, and DRM. Since these would be specialized set-top boxes, the distributors could use the full disk space to intelligently cache frequently requested chunks and ensure even less-popular offerings can be had readily. And if they combined torrent protocols with multicasting (which must be implemented at the network/router level) the technology could be made even faster and more efficient, especially for very popular files where multiple people per network branch are requesting the same thing. Of course they could skip that option and use their own websites to bypass DVD distributors and cable networks entirely...