BitTorrent Inventor Bram Cohen Wants to Kill Off Television With New Project

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With all the ACTA, SOPA and PIPA talk around, coupled with the Megaupload scandal, or the unexpected termination of various torrent sites, one would certainly be intrigue to hear that Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, wants to “kill off television” with a brand new project.

But the new P2P live streaming protocol BitTorrent Inc. is working on is not necessarily a band thing for the content-loving crowds, and it doesn’t necessarily imply that copyright will be infringed by a future product that could rival current TV station. Cohen demoed the product yesterday during the San Francisco MusicTech Summit, although an actual commercial release date for such a product is not yet available:

BitTorrent Inc. hasn’t said how exactly it intends to productize the protocol, but Cohen said on Monday that he is talking to a number of potential partners. BitTorrent has also started to run a number of field tests on its website in recent months, streaming weekly live music events with the P2P protocol.

The ultimate winners of a P2P-based solution could be consumers, he argued, because it would enable publishers to put much more content online at a fraction of the cost of traditional CDNs. “Most of the video that people consume today is still not on the Internet,” said Cohen, adding that existing protocols aren’t set up to support big live events.

In a world where the supremacy of TV stations is challenged on a daily basis by various Internet-based digital content stores that offer users, for the right price, instant and unlimited access to a plethora of TV shows and movies uninterrupted by commercials, such a P2P product that could stream live various events at reduced cost could deliver another significant blow to TV stations. Unless of course the networks themselves will decide to use the technology in their own advantage.

What’s certain is that the actual TV set will not die anytime soon, no matter whether the networks take a hit in the process or not. We, the end-users, are prone to consume more and more digital content on our smarter and smarter TVs in the coming years, especially considering that some very hot TV sets are about to hit stores in the very near future.