Professional BitTorrent?
from the here-they-come... dept
A startup, Atzio, is now claiming that they have the first peer-to-peer internet platform for television, apparently ignoring something like BitTorrent. Of course, the technology can basically be described as... BitTorrent with copy protection (how innovative). Plus, they only allow a select group of clients to seed material on the network, making it less likely that people will bother to download the software to make it possible for all this P2P television distribution. The company's own website, amusingly, claims it's having trouble handling all the traffic from the news of their launch -- which might raise some concerns from a company telling the entertainment industry they can handle the distribution of large files in great demand. Still, you have to wonder how effective this sort of solution is. The whole point of their system is you want more people getting and redistributing the content, but then they throw in this copy protection, which is almost laughable considering the system doesn't work if people aren't copying from you while you're copying from others. Besides, if you're a content producer, why bother paying this startup (and I assume they want money) to put your content on their network, when it's easier to just create a torrent, and get it out there -- where a lot more people already have BitTorrent clients.
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