BitTorrent's Move From PCs to TVs
If the thought of having BitTorrent, the world's most famous file-swapping software, available on your set-top box to download high-definition movies from major Hollywood studios seems far-fetched, you're not alone. — In an e-mail interview with Wired News …
Context & Ripple Effects
BitTorrent arrives at this moment from strength and from baggage: it posted record growth as a file-sharing technology through 2005, yet in late 2005 unauthorized installs were confirmed linking pirated-movie drops to a Middle-East-connected rootkit-powered botnet on victims' PCs. On the same day this Wired News interview runs, Business Wire separately carries news of the uTorrent acquisition, consolidating the client side of the business.
What is genuinely new here is positioning, not traffic: in the e-mail interview, BitTorrent floats moving its software from PCs onto TV set-top boxes, and its reported talks with the major Hollywood studios to deliver high-definition movies remain just that — rumored and unconfirmed by any studio.
First-order effects
- If the studio talks firm up, the Hollywood majors gain a licensed HD delivery channel running on the same protocol that made BitTorrent the dominant file-sharing technology of 2005.
- BitTorrent's brand would have to cross from desktop piracy utility to living-room consumer-electronics component, carrying the reputational residue of episodes like the 2005 botnet-linked installs.
Second-order effects
- Owning uTorrent gives any licensed TV service an existing base of lightweight-client users to convert, rather than requiring BitTorrent to build an audience from scratch.
- Studios evaluating the channel get distribution economics in which end users' own connections carry the heavy bytes — a structural cost contrast with centralized HD download storefronts.
Third-order effects
- If licensed P2P reaches televisions, the industry's binary framing of BitTorrent as either piracy tool or legitimate pipe breaks down, forcing rights holders and regulators to treat the protocol itself as neutral infrastructure.
- Consumer-electronics makers gain pricing leverage over studios by deciding which delivery protocols their set-top hardware supports.
The trend: File-sharing infrastructure is migrating from the PC into the living room, as BitTorrent attempts to convert its record 2005 growth into studio-sanctioned HD distribution.