Broadcast without broadcasters ?

Following on a question by Tim Bray, Raph Levien considers whether or not BitTorrent is a game changer:

There's another impact BT is poised to make. Now, all of a sudden, digital video is on the computer technology curve, not the video technology curve. HDTV has been the video technology of the future for about 20 years now. I still don't have any HDTV gear, but I've watched some movie trailers in 720p, downloaded using BitTorrent, of course. HD isn't widespread yet, but all you need is 3 GHz computers instead of 1 GHz, nice monitors, and fast DSL like they have in Korea. Does anyone seriously doubt that this will happen, and soon?

Now that everybody who's online is so thorougly disenchanted with the stupidity of broadcast television, and now that the size of this digital elite is a sizable double digit percentage of (some) industrialized countries [TODO: Insert link to other persons blog post mentioning some high percentage] should we expect to start seeing things like independent news broadcasting that never really originated on television Should we expect another online media first for next years presidential election?

Infrequently Asked Question
Q: Why are you interested in broadcast at all. Isn' t P2P (that's Point To Point) supposed to be The Right Thing To Do?
A: Massivily parallel reception of the same message is not necessariliy evil. It can be a powerful coherence builder. And coherence can be good.

Posted by Claus at November 29, 2003 10:25 PM | TrackBack (0)