It’s amazing that there truly is an on-demand IP system through the magic and universal goodness of netizens who continue to enable it. Just about a year ago, I had missed a few recordings due to a DVR glitch and in the past two weeks I’ve missed a few more due to having new DVRs in the new house… No problem, thanks to some shared bandwidth and a bit of time (though not that much actually) I was able to recover the shows I wanted to watch.
P2P networks are amazingly powerful and in particular Bit Torrent can be a seriously disruptive technology. I think the right publisher or content creator can really enable a vast content network. Imagine if Bit Torrent was enabled through your set-top box connected to your TV and your playlist was simply a seed request and completed uploads that were being shared back. Given how the credit system works, you could easily be sharing with a vast viewing public in a more high end way to your TV, rather than to you PC. Certainly those of us with HTPC configurations can take advantage of a set-up like this today.
The shows I’ve been finding are the HDTV versions, stripped of ads and ready to watch. How do you like to watch? Even with a DVR, you have to fast forward… this is a straight pass. Last night I was able to pull down something I had missed from Thursday which I would not have been able to have watched that day anyway. It’s quite likely that this one hour show was available sooner, I just did not have the chance to download what I needed any earlier. Regardless when I did it only took about an hour to download to my desktop, which is pretty amazing considering the file is about 350MB.
Bit Torrent recently received a nice round of venture financing which could certainly make this a more accessible system… peerhaps for the IPTV crowd as a shared DVR of sorts against the cable cos. Who knows…
Technorati Tags: MediaCenter, HDTV, DVR, TV, software