"I know personally for a fact that various members of the movie industry are really getting interested in how to use the Internet--even BitTorrent--as a distributed method for distributing content," Cerf said. "I've spoken with several movie producers in the last month." Cerf was adamant the entertainment industry still did not understand the online environment. "They are only just now starting to come to honest grips with the possibilities of using the Internet," he said.
He also pointed out what he believes to be a flawed perception that the Internet is capable of providing movies in real-time. "People think of video and they think of real-time, watching it as it's coming out [downloading]," he said. "But most video doesn't have to be watched in real-time. With TiVo and those other things it doesn't have to be watched in real-time." TiVo products allow viewers to record from TV to a PVR device to watch later.
"It doesn't matter whether it's delivered by a real-time video stream, or a triple-charge thing that drops packets into a file like BitTorrent. Who cares? At some point you get the whole file and then you watch it. You don't care how long it took to get a file before you watch it." Cerf added. Also you have to remember that consumers who already use BitTorrent to get movies will be used to waiting for a few hours before they actually get to view their download so a lot of potential customers to a legal movie service won’t be upset by its lack of "real time" capability.
Source:
ZDNet
Written by: James Delahunty @ 14 Apr 2005 14:56
