BitTorrent Morphing into Internet 'Broadcast TV' Service

The next phase of BitTorrent's amazing transformation from the service whose name legislators made, by accident or design, synonymous with copyright infringement to the engine for a legitimately sanctioned commercial industry, began today.

Brightcove, which provides Internet streaming services to commercial broadcasters including CBS, Fox, and Discovery Communications, will incorporate the P2P streaming technology as "BitTorrent DNA" into its new IP video delivery platform, which it promises will bring broadcast-quality video to Flash-enabled players as soon as next year.

This afternoon, a BitTorrent spokesperson confirmed to BetaNews that it is indeed producing "a productized version of BitTorrent that we are now making available as a service to wide array of content publishers."

The "DNA" stands for "Delivery Network Accelerator," and it's now BitTorrent's three-letter abbreviation of choice as even the company's technological description of itself now omits all mention of "P2P."

As explained there, DNA customers will be able to supplement their existing content delivery networks (CDN) with feeds from BitTorrent's "peer network" when necessary. A quality-of-service bit traded between the CDN and a new BitTorrent client denotes how much supplemental service that client needs from DNA peers in order to bring the picture back up to par.

So content hosts that use Brightcove's forthcoming "Brightcove Show" content network will continue to see their programs hosted through a single service - to begin with. But as that content gets disseminated throughout the Internet and as more clients request it, those clients may be able to leverage BitTorrent feeds when necessary, if those feeds are faster or more readily available. This way, even a medium-level media server will be able to provide feeds to a greater number of customers than just a few hundred.

This afternoon, Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire - in a corrected statement - said, "By integrating [BitTorrent DNA] into a new offering in our Internet TV service, we can give our content publishers the option to easily deliver full-screen, broadcast-quality streaming video to their viewers." Earlier this morning, Allaire stated through his own company that Brightcove Show would enable its customers to offer full-length programming and movies rather than the short clips they rely upon now.

The end product of all this could be a kind of IP-driven "meta-broadcast" service, where users pull in network-quality programs from multiple providers at full resolution on their own schedules, complete with advertising. Those schedules could be determined using the viewers' own software, resulting in personally-programmed channels in possibly customized motifs.

Such an adaptive product could give considerable competition to Joost, which serves an eclectic palette of programming today but through a single service, with a schedule determined on the fly.

If all this comes to fruition, BitTorrent could find itself synonymous with high-grade commercial programming, fully completing a degree of market image transformation many believe Napster never could accomplish.