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BitTorrent, everyone’s favorite, misunderstood protocol has inked deals with Paramount, 20th Centruy Fox, Lions Gate, Palm Pictures and Kadokawa Pictures. And a ton of cable companies including G4, Starz and Viacom’s properties.

Why is this important? This holiday season has been huge for HD content. Massive. You couldn’t read a Black Friday ad without stumbling across a HD plasma going for less than $1,000 bucks. Living rooms across America are going to be full of glorious 16×9 screens owned by people who haven’t a clue what to do with them. But that isn’t the point. The point is that these screens now have digital inputs and resolution high enough to be agnostic to the origination of content.

That being so, and also being that every device aimed at that HDMI input now is in a sense a functioning computer, the middle-man of the 5 inch disc likewise needs to be removed. This of course provided that the transition to pure digital doesn’t make people shoot themselves in the foot with the DRM bullets. Anyhow, digital downloads, as we know, depend on bandwidth. Bandwidth is expensive, subject to scaling issues and its single-point origination (as with iTunes, etc) is incongruent with what the web can and should do.

Enter BitTorrent. I’ve been playing with Democracy lately, and its combination of direct download and torrents is absolutely great. Its seamless and transparent to the user and does not require any explanation of what is going on in the back. The nicest thing is, with HD content coming in at near 2 to 3 gigabytes or more, it nicely distributes the bandwidth between clients. The same situation of course looks to be true with the Venice project.

What we’re facing now is not a concern about content, but about the methods to deliver the content. BitTorrent is the logical answer, and as a company, it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with.