BitTorrent is a file-sharing system that ties downloading speed to the amount of files being shared. It is a powerful tool, particularly in combination with other delivery technologies.

While relatively simple, the Bit Torrent protocol does require a little introduction to grasp how it works as well as gauging its remarkable potential. One of the best explanations for the Bit Torrent system is found on the How Stuff Works website (computer.howstuffworks.com/bittorrent.htm/ printable)

The following short introduction is provided on the link, but it is well worth the time to further explore the link, which has useful explanations and fine graphics:

BitTorrent is a protocol that enables fast downloading of large files using minimum Internet bandwidth. BitTorrent costs nothing to use and includes no spyware or pop-up advertising.

Unlike other download methods, BitTorrent maximizes transfer speed by gathering pieces of the file you want and downloading these pieces simultaneously from people who already have them. This process makes popular and very large files, such as videos and television programs, download much faster than is possible with other protocols.

With BitTorrent, the more files you share with others, the faster your downloads are. Finally, to make better use of available Internet bandwidth (the pipeline for data transmission), BitTorrent downloads different pieces of the file you want simultaneously from multiple computers.

Downloading pieces of the file at the same time helps solve a common problem with other peer-to-peer download methods: peers upload at a much slower rate than they download. By downloading multiple pieces at the same time, the overall speed is greatly improved. The more computers involved in the swarm, the faster the file transfer occurs because there are more sources of each piece of the file. For this reason, BitTorrent is especially useful for large, popular files.

The BitTorrent website (www.bittorrent.com) goes on to add that “Cooperative distribution can grow almost without limit, because each new participant brings not only demand, but also supply. Instead of a vicious cycle, popularity creates a virtuous cycle. And because each new participant brings new resources to the distribution, you get limitless scalability for a nearly fixed cost.”

Veteran online content producer Mark Pesce speaks to the ability of the peer-to-peer tools like Bit Torrent technology and the related Kontiki P2P tool when combined with a large-scale television operation like the BBC that had the foresight to deploy the tool to its best advantage:

One of the biggest media organizations around — the BBC — is getting in front of this trend with something they’re calling “Flexible TV.” It’s a PC-based application which gives residents of the UK access to the BBC programming schedule, within a two-week window: a week before the present moment, and a week after. Viewers make their selections from the program schedule, and the programs are downloaded to the users’ hard disks. The BBC is testing Flexible TV with a thousand users, but expect it to be rolled out across the UK by the end of the year.

A broadcaster spends the same amount of money whether 10 people or 10 million are watching a broadcast, because the broadcast tower reaches all who want to tune into it. The economics for netcasting are quite different. Anyone can set up a server to send out ten simultaneous program streams — but it requires a million times the infrastructure and bandwidth to serve the same program to 10 million people.

Or it used to.

The BBC has cleverly designed the Flexible TV application to act as a node in a Peer-to-Peer network. Anyone using Flexible TV has access to the programs which have been downloaded by any other Flexible TV client, and can get those programs directly from them. All BBC need do is provide a single copy of a program into the network of P2P clients, and they handle the work themselves. More than this, because of the P2P technology used by the BBC (more on this in a moment) a Flexible TV user can get a little bit of the program from any number of other peers; rather than going through the process of downloading an entire program from one other peer, the Flexible TV client can ask a hundred other clients for small sections of the program, and download these hundred sections simultaneously. Not only does this decrease the amount of traffic that any clients has to handle, it also means that it produces a virtuous cycle: the more popular a program is, the more copies of it will exist in the network of peers, and therefore the more easily a peer can download it.

In other words, the BBC has cracked the big problem that has prevented netcasting from taking off. In this system of "peercasting" the network is actually more efficient than a broadcast network, because more than one program can be provided simultaneously, and failure in any one point in the network doesn’t bring the network down. In other words, this network can’t be hacked, can’t suffer from a power outage (unless it spans the whole network, which is very unlikely) and achieves unheard-of efficiencies in the distribution of audiovisual programming.

But what about DVDs? How could the BBC/Bit Torrent example be adapted in the United States? There are a growing number of small public television channels in America, none of which is connected to the politically vulnerable PBS network. These channels include Link TV, Free Speech TV and Current, with others in the incubation mode, like Independent World Television (IWT). And there are a variety of public-minded content providers with no direct television outlet who are eager to use Bit Torrent to distribute their work online. An Open Network Portal is currently in development with Link TV, radio broadcaster Air America, the SEIU union, the AlterNet website and several others. The portal will deploy the latest iteration of Bit Torrent, called the “Broadcast Machine.” Holmes Wilson, of the Downhill Battle team that is developing the Broadcast Machine, which will be an even easier tool for uploading programming with the Bit Torrent software and subsequently delivering the content via the internet.

One of the advantages of the Open Network is that it combines the ability to do free web publishing with the Broadcast Machine tool with other functionalities derived from other open source tools. Open Network also offers full set of online community tools, an application called DTV that lets you manage subscriptions to video content, a well-established Content Management System (CMS) that makes it easy to upload content. Adding a new video, plus all the descriptive information that goes with it, takes about three minutes. So quality video distribution can be both free and fast. Another advantage is that there is an existing web design template that is both more attractive than most online distribution venues and it allows every content partner in the Open Network to get its own, branded pages to showcase its video content.

There are already analogous combinations of online-based functionalities to the Open Network. For example, the Open Media Network (www.omn.org) uses a peer-to-peer delivery tool called Kontiki that is comparable to Bit Torrent and has other features such as the ability to do subscriptions via RSS and has built-in digital rights management in its system.

A growing number of groups and individuals are creating new custom-built hardware to best deploy and distribute Bit Torrents. For example, Drazen Pantic at the exhibition and artist residence space Location One in New York is building an inexpensive box that would be an effective Bit Torrent seeder as well as a vehicle for the useful DV Guide. In addition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties organization, set up what it is calling the Television Digital Liberation Front. Starting in July 2004, it began holding the first of a planned series of nationwide "build-a-thons" to help novices build home-brew digital televisions and DVRs based on systems like the perfectly legal MythTV software.

Any one of these broadcast networks could work with Bit Torrent software and custom hardware designers and set up a very effective transmission system for sending digital signals to millions of homes. And millions of these homes are or will be outfitted with DVD burners. A flow of programming could easily do from DVDs to Bit Torrents to television signals and then back to the DVD owner.