b.cognosco

Technologic Partners.  Economical P2P distribution of large files.  Will a system ever arrive that isn't tied to copyright infringement activities?  Of course.  This newsletter takes a look at the opportunity both in the enterprise and consumer markets.

Glowing brightly in the distance, of course, is the vast, largely untapped consumer market. There, potentially millions of people might one day be requesting endless quantities of bulky video and music files, quite likely with help from distributed and even P2P-based delivery systems. Indeed, video-on-demand has become a reality for the growing cohort of broadband-connected PC users who regularly stuff their hard drives with video programming from the Net.

Unfortunately, most of the P2P systems in the marketplace today are merely shared hard-drives.  This poses multiple obstacles to utilization:

1. There is little integration of the current "shared hard-drive" approach to P2P with the Web/Intranet publishing process.
2. Shared hard-drives coupled with search lead to copyright infringement.
3. There is little incentive for people to download these client applications to their desktops.  The process of downloading large files isn't tied to a contextual user experience.

The key to solving these problems is to tie weblog publishing to a P2P system.  This will provide the following:

1. The ability to easily publish links to large files on P2P systems to the Web/Intranet.
2. The ability to avoid a shared hard-drive approach to file sharing by closely coupling files that are published via P2P to known individuals.
3. A process that ties contextual information published on a weblog to files that are available on the P2P system.   This system loops back in that it allows people that download files via P2P to republish links to these files to their own weblogs.

The end result of this integration will be a system that enables enterprise customers, small businesses, schools, non-profits, and individuals to publish/share large files with thousands of readers at a fixed cost.  My guess is that it will open the floodgates to all of the digital content that is currently being produced by individuals inexpensively using new low-cost digital media equipment.  Finally, we are starting to see the emergence of a true "personal broadcast network" where individuals can vie with professionals in the production and distribution of media. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]