…and it is going to require petabyte storage systems in the home. A clever programmer has married two of my current fave geek toys, Bit Torrent and RSS. Imagine a system where you subscribe to certain content channels, say ‘1970’s comedy tv’ and ‘classical music,’ and every morning when you wake up, there’s a selection of such content available to you on your home machine/network. Seem far fetched? Wired has an article covering a prototype of such a system, built by a clever programmer. It’s not really ready for the average user yet, and it’s built on Userland’s Radio, which limits the potential audience, but the concept is just fantastic. I really hope (and expect) that refined versions of this are going to pop up like wildflowers over the next couple of months. Get ready for a multimedia content rich summer and a freaked out broadcast television industry.

As an aside, I really feel like there’s an opportunity here for Apple. Imagine a setop box from them that works like a tivo, but has the RSS publishing and bit torrent file sharing built in. Tie this to their .mac and iTunes architecture. This would offer Apple the opportunity to bypass the broadcast and cable networks in the same way that iTunes and the music store offer Apple the potential to become the music distribution point, bypassing the recording studios. Steve Jobs is just the iconclast to bring this to the public over the loudly protesting corpse of the existing broadcast and publishing industries that can’t bring themselves to adapt to the always on networked future.