The Coming Media Revolution ("The BitTorrent Effect" -- 'Wired' Magazine)

[StefanX]

"All hell's about to break loose," says Brad Burnham, a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures in Manhattan, which studies the impact of new technology on traditional media. BitTorrent does not require the wires or airwaves that the cable and network giants have spent billions constructing and buying. And it pounds the final nail into the coffin of must-see, appointment television. BitTorrent transforms the Internet into the world's largest TiVo.

One example of how the world has already changed: Gary Lerhaupt, a graduate student in computer science at Stanford, became fascinated with Outfoxed, the documentary critical of Fox News, and thought more people should see it. So he convinced the film's producer to let him put a chunk of it on his Web site for free, as a 500-Mbyte torrent. Within two months, nearly 1,500 people downloaded it. That's almost 750 gigs of traffic, a heck of a wallop. But to get the ball rolling, Lerhaupt's site needed to serve up only 5 gigs. After that, the peers took over and hosted it themselves. His bill for that bandwidth? $4. There are drinks at Starbucks that cost more. "It's amazing - I'm a movie distributor," he says. "If I had my own content, I'd be a TV station."

During the last century, movie and TV companies had to be massive to afford distribution. Those economies of scale aren't needed anymore. Will the future of broadcasting need networks, or even channels?

"Blogs reduced the newspaper to the post. In TV, it'll go from the network to the show," says Jeff Jarvis, president of the Internet strategy company Advance.net and founder of Entertainment Weekly. ... Burnham goes one step further. He thinks TV-viewing habits are becoming even more atomized. People won't watch entire shows; they'll just watch the parts they care about.

Evidence that Burnham's prediction is coming true came a few weeks before the US presidential election in November, when Jon Stewart - host of Comedy Central's irreverent The Daily Show - made a now-famous appearance on CNN's Crossfire. Stewart attacked the hosts, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, calling them political puppets. "What you do is partisan hackery," he said, just before he called Carlson "a dick." Amusing enough, but what happened next was more remarkable. Delighted fans immediately ripped the segment and posted it online as a torrent. Word of Stewart's smackdown spread rapidly through the blogs, and within a day at least 4,000 servers were hosting the clip. One host reported having, at any given time, more than a hundred peers swapping and downloading the file. No one knows exactly how many people got the clip through BitTorrent, but this kind of traffic on the very first day suggests a number in the hundreds of thousands - and probably much higher. Another 2.3 million people streamed it from iFilm.com over the next few weeks. By contrast, CNN's audience for Crossfire was only 867,000. Three times as many people saw Stewart's appearance online as on CNN itself.

This is from page 2 of a five-page article from 'Wired' magazine here:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html?pg=2&topic=bittorrent&topic_set=

And people are also using BitTorrent to share stuff they made themselves (that didn't originate on cable or network). See fireant.tv to get a free program that does this.

More info at an earlier DU thread here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=387874&mesg_id=387874

[zanne]

1. Corporate American won't let it pass them by.

They'll find a way to own it.

[Solon]

2. Not possible, but there would be ways to still make money from it...

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but they wouldn't own the means of distribution(like they do now), just the content.

[StefanX]

3. They don't own DU or Kos or Blogger, do they?

I think video-blogs will be like text-blogs -- a major pain in the ass for corporate media, which they can do absolutely NOTHING about. (Remember what a flop PajamaLine was.)

[zanne]

4. Not yet.

But corporate America has the power; NOT the Republican or Democratic parties and certainly not bloggers.