As further evidence that the digital downloading culture is about to crash like a wave upon feature films, a press release for Ipsos-Insight’s Quarterly Digital Music Study Tempo reveals that between late-December and early-January 21% of their study group had downloaded a full-length feature film from the Internet (in fact, 9% of them had done so in the last 30 days.) It's time for filmmakers to starting getting the product out there ... otherwise that landscape is going to be dominated by rips of commercial DVDs (sorry Artisan ... sorry Focus Features ... sorry Newmarket.) Of course, if you listen to the MPAA when they quote AT&T Labs, "77% of popular movies being illegally traded online were leaked by Hollywood insiders." Studios aren't going to lead the way on this one anymore than they did on MP3s: it's up to the independents to find the business models that work.

/. points out a fascinating Scientific American interview from last month with the founder of the Moving Picture Experts Group (responsible for such formats as MP3 and MPEG-2) about the future of digital media. Leonardo bemoans the current issues that have kept digital media from expanding to it's potentials, and his common sense approach is a breath of fresh air.

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Other development and writing tasks have kept me away from blogging about some of my experiments, but I'm getting ready this weekend to move my experiment on "gated torrents" (see previous thoughts). My current experiments have been focused on simple gating with .htaccess (ie, you get a piece of the equation or you don't) but I'm ready this weekend to instead move my test to a BitPass gateway as the last tests before a real distribution. I've learned some interesting things already that I thought I might share.

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Avoiding the side-issues of Bannedmusic.org's efforts, they present one of the most concise formulas yet for making BitTorrent downloads more of a no brainer -- a self-installing copy of BitTorrent with the torrent file, wrapped in a Nullsoft Installer (they even provide a wrapping script.) While this only works on Windows machines, it installs BitTorrent (so in the future people can just download the torrent file, which seems a slight improvement over Blizzard's approach.) They also included a link to Azureus, a Java library for building BitTorrent applications.

Given that I've written about how BitTorrent could work with transactions, it probably isn't surprising that I've been thinking about how the concept of broadcatching (learn more) might support online video distribution that looked like "made for Internet television". We've tried "cybercasting festivals" and "live Internet shows" and all of them suffered from the expense of the peaks of demand. While broadcatching optimizes away those peaks (turning them into the least expensive phase of distributing the video), it leaves the problems of archiving older materials as the new cost problem. Does this mean that the best new "net television" business model might be, "free when it's new, but you pay for archives?"

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On the surface, the ideas of micropayments and download swarming don't seem immediately compatible -- micropayments seem most effective for small fees, and download swarming encourages a rushing to the tipping point of efficiency that micropayments seem like a barrier in achieving. From a video standpoint, though, they are both solutions to bandwidth cost issues that prevent more Internet publishing of "big media objects". The relatively trivial technical issues to deploy a BitTorrent + BitPass combo, however, belies the real puzzle underneath -- how the "ethos" of the BitTorrent community interacts with the model.

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As I talk to more and more people about BitTorrent+RSS, I'm frequently asked to provide some URLs to get people up to speed. I've found I've narrowed down the "here's the scoop" email to five links (which it occured to me I may as well post to the blog and, in the process, condense down to one URL!)

(1) Theory.org's Bit Torrent FAQ Wiki

(2) "Experimenting with BitTorrent and RSS 2.0" by Andrew Grumet

(3) Wired's "Speed Meets Feed in Download Tool"

(4) "BitTorrent & RSS Video Feeds" at banjax blog

(5) Ernest Miller's writings on BitTorrent

Andrew Grumet's idea for BitTorrent + RSS broadcatching that I wrote about on Monday has produced the first working tool -- one that ties into Radio Userland's news aggregator. Extremely beta, but the beginning of an interesting experiment.

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BitTorrent (a peer-to-peer download swarming system) might be primarily about music, and RSS might be primarily about text, but the combination of the two raise interesting questions for distributed video (thanks Cinema Minima for the newest developments.) Andrew Grumet (who's previous work includes an interesting RSS+Tivo hack and a RSSTV proposal) first blogged about the concept in December ("Given its strengths, BitTorrent will probably be the killer app for dealing with RSS enclosures when they catch on") but has now started to blog about practical implementation issues. Ernest Miller is calling it broadcatching. What's this got to do with video?

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