Thanks to Om Malik for this great story:http://gigaom.com/2005/09/23/bit-torrent-raises-875-million/
At Gnomdex this year a great deal of the conversation was about BitTorrent, and how the best way to legitimize it is to use it legitimately – use it for podcasts, video blog casts, spreading your own content, open source software, sharing legal and Creative Commons work – change the conversation from what it could do (piracy) to what it does do (sharing, transmitting, communicating – you know, like the internet).
Om Malik is reporting that the BitTorrent guys have just lined up financing of $8.75 million dollars. Now while that isnt dotcom money (aaaarrrggghhh!!!) it is still a nice chunka change for developing and rolling out bittorrent to the world. And while the big studios and record companies wouldn’t use the technology, with the right safeguards (like software keys, etc.) media companies could change how they distribute and share content with their users.
More and more we are seeing things like NerdTV, Systm, Rocketboom , Digg, and OurMedia– professional quality ‘programming’ (video or audio, sometimes user generated) distributed through the web. BitTorrent is a natural for this – taking advantage of bandwidth, the distributed aspects of the swarm, blah blah blah.
Can’t wait to see what comes next.