
The whole BitTorrent idea appeals to me tremendously. There is obviously potential for tremendous abuse (I ran a couple searches for tv series I would like to have and found most of them on BitTorrent for (illegal) download) and I can see how enticing the prospect of loads of free stuff can be even though it is totally illegal. This side of BitTorrent has unfortunately tarnished the protocol/service and it would be great to see a lot more emphasis placed on it as a legitimate distribution channel for legitimate content like open source applications, content licensed under alternative licensing schemes like Creative Commons licenses and so on.
A related service also appeals to me tremendously. I signed up for Amazon’s S3 service a while ago because of the promise of extremely cheap file storage. I didn’t really use it except to poke around and try figure out how to use it. I finally figured out how to configure Transmit to connect to the service and upload files and since then I have been thinking about the possibilities.
I have been thinking about relaunching my Legally Content podcast and S3 would be a perfect service to use to host my episodes. I also understand that S3 supports BitTorrent (haven’t figured out how that works yet) so it would be awesome to publish my podcast both the usual way and perhaps even as a torrent feed (ok, working on this one too). I don’t know how successful a BitTorrent version of the podcast would be compared to the normal RSS alternative given that I don’t know how many subscribers will use the torrent option and my understanding that unless you have a lot of people accessing the files, the download rates will be low. I am keen to try it out though so as soon as I work out how to publish a torrent, I’ll get that set up.
As a related aside, I see that you can buy content to be downloaded via BitTorrent too. It would be great to see more commercial applications of this technology that we can use down South.
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bittorrent, amazon s3, xtorrent, podcast
What do you think?