hear of Bittorrent? It’s another clever scheme to help distribute popular content. Many of you are probably familiar with the fileplanet problem, ie you want some hot new download, a movie trailer, a demo of a new game, but when you go to grab it you discover the server hosting it is overwhelmed and you get 2k/second downloads, or it’s hosted in in fileplanet and you have to wait in line for your file. Bitttorrent is trying to solve this problem by using peer to peer distribution – the idea is a file is published in bittorrent, and when you click on a bittorrent link, you download the file from the collective network of bittorrent installs. Meanwhile you also begin to distribute the portions of the file you’ve already downloaded to others who are trying to download the same file. It’s a very effective scheme to handle instances of instant demand, like the release of the new Matrix trailer.

As it turns out it’s a good scheme for other scenarios as well, take for example recordings of popular tv shows. Why bother with a VCR or a tivo when I can just use bittorrent to grab any show I’ve missed/want to see and download it? I’ve used this approach for over a year now using other mechanisms (mostly dc++ of late), but bitorrent makes it easier to get ahold of the content you’re looking for.

Anyway it’s all worth a look if you’re interested. I still have the problem of how to get this content onto my bigscreen tv – plugging the laptop into the home theater system is a pain in the ass, as is the constant recording of CD’s, they just don’t fit enough content. But that’s a problem for another day 😉