Sure, it is possible for someone like Youtube to exist at all nowadays, which is amazing (well, exist in that their site is still there, even though they were bought). That doesn’t mean that it isn’t insanely expensive to run, however.

Using some sort of peer-to-peer distribution mechanism should be able to decrease the cost to distribute by an order of magnitude – a not insignificant sum.

The thing is, this will only work _BETTER_ the cheaper bandwidth gets.

The problem right now is that most peoples’ connections are too anemic to mean much, even when banded together.

If network speeds everywhere increased by 10x, peer-to-peer would be in much better shape to compete with centralized distribution.

Hollywood continues to love BitTorrent. Or do they? Last year, I questioned the wisdom of Hollywood’s embrace of BitTorrent in the face of the growing threat of anonymous BitTorrent clients. On the heels of this week’s big press release, it

I think products like Democracy Player are definitely a step in the right direction, but they only solve part of the problem.

Ideally, people still want instant gratification – both on lower-quality video previews as well as not needing to download a client. And for content producers, you still run into the same incentive issues I wrote about.

And finally, the question is, what kind of content ends up on these media networks? If you have long-tail content without the hit stuff, does that still work? I think all that YouTube and P2P networks have proven is that piracy of hits drives a lot of traffic

It seems like this is answering many of your questions – they are offering a destination, integrating Bittorrent into another tool, even making VLC usable for the mainstream …

FakeYourSpace will help you look more popular on MySpace with fake hot friends. You actually subscribe…

Veoh is solving the problem of Bit Torrent complexity and abstraction of the transport from Internet Television consumption.

Veoh has a proprietary P2P network, similar to Bit Torrent, but better at penetrating firewalls and centrally controlled. We abstract all of this with a TiVo-like (including remote controlled) client application that downloads high bitrate video files that are published to the Veoh Network, automatically maintains disk cleanup (deleting watched videos unless you have chose to save them), and manages your bandwidth as not to eat up your Internet connection when you are using your computer for other networked activities. Publishing is as simple as YouTube… just upload a file, give it some metadata, and you’re done. We take care of transcoding to all major formats (including iPod compatible), and offer the file in a Flash progressive download off our web site (or yours) (just like YouTube but with no length restrictions), and offer the original file for automatic download. There are RSS feeds, intelligent recommendations to help you find things you may like, a social network, etc.

We are about to launch our monetization capabilities allowing broadcasters to charge for their content or share in ad revenues on free content, and a slew of other features that make it easier than ever to publish Internet Television rather than Web Video.

Dmitry

You should try out mediasilo.com for managing and sharing production videos and media files in a team environment. Site is in private beta right now.

-Vivek

You’re right that you can avoid these problems by:

- Bundling BitTorrent into existing software, like a browser or an OS
- Integrate VLC with codec updates

… but even then, you have problems with instant gratification and all the issues regarding studios versus long tail folks.

Obviously we were trying to do a browser toolbar integration, but in reality, to make this a snap, someone who owns an underlying platform like Apple or Microsoft has to push BitTorrent technology, and we all know it won’t be MSFT

Plus, would you really hang your startup on having a huge company do something that you couldn’t control?

http://www.blackfriarsinc.com/blog/2006/05/apples-torrent-technology-could-dodge.html

Carl

http://broadstuff.com/categories/2-MyPCTV

By the way, are you aware of TIOTI and what it is trying to do with BitTorrent?

Things are getting interesting in the Xmas runup….

Google paid $1.65bn for YouTube, but a report today in Forbes says that a new challenger to YouTube is already growing up in Paris. Called DailyMotion, it is apparently the new location du jour for a