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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.

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[…] blackrimglasses.com » Blog Archive » Finally a movie store that answers the bandwidth question […]

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[…] Ethan Kaplan points out the advantages to protocols, like BitTorrent, that lend to large downloads such as HD movies (for purchase/rent of course). […]

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[…] Ethan Kaplan points out the advantages to protocols, like BitTorrent, that lend to large downloads such as HD movies (for purchase/rent of course). […]

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Here's what I am:
  • Ethan Kaplan
  • 29 years old
  • VP of Technology at Warner Bros. Records
  • Married to Amy Haber Kaplan
  • Resident of Toluca Lake, CA
  • Master of Fine Arts in Conceptual Art, UCSB, 2005
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I Flock
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yeah, Dries, what's with that?

[From Has been... | Willy Dobbe]
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The XMPP feed was really cool. Why Twitter won't allow relaying is beyond me. If twitter decentralized and did a node/hub based architecture with a good toolkit, things would be much different.

[From No XMPP: What Is Twitter Protecting?]
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So why couldn't a loosely coupled, queue based system using XMPP work as a twitter clone? Hash table lookups for @replies, a good OSPF type routing table for interserver communication and asynchronous messaging propagation. Lets get cracking!

[From

Identi.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom - ReadWriteWeb

]
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The dutch certainly like their Twitters! That's better twitter coverage than we got at most of the US shows.
[From July 2nd, Amsterdam, Netherlands | R.E.M. Tour, 2008]
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For the past ten years "tapped for web series" has usually been synonymous for "lots of money on stuff no one will want to watch." Can Google + MacFarlane reverse this? Probably not, because they don't understand the concept of Windowing. Content is successful when not built up with expectations.

[From Google taps 'Family Guy' guy for Web series | Tech news blog - CNET News.com]
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so this reminds me that Indigo Home Automation software + native iPhone App is going to absolutely MURDER as a home automation device. IndigoIndigo has an IP protocol and Zeroconf support. Our iPod Touch in our house is already doing this using a web based interface for us. Also consider the possibilities of using the iPod to control a wider array of devices, like your home stereo (using IRTransIRTrans), your air conditioner, etc. The iPod Touch suddenly kills the Phillips Prestigo, Logitech Harmony, etc. The Touch costs less than the Harmony, but IRTrans is not that cheap.

[From Apple to Offer iTunes Remote Control App for iPhone and iPod Touch - Mac Rumors]
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Crystal was a great asset to the team and it will be sad to lose her, but our loss is many other people's gains and I wish her well in Seattle!

[From Clever, Clever Girl » Big Changes and a Bigger Move]
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This is severely retarded. Honestly. In Orange County, a city with a plentiful population of people needing jobs and wanting to work and invested in their communities, a paper instead opts to crowdsource through Indian outsourcing than maybe offering to give something back to the community by crowd sourcing through, maybe parts of the city with high unemployment? Fuck. The stupidity abounds.

[From OC Register to outsource some editing to India]
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So this is another in the line of REM experiments. With this one, fans can help create the animations for the tour backdrop in the European leg, through October. The animations will get assembled and shipped off to Blue Leach, who is doing the background video.

[From -- R.E.M. HOLLOW MAN --]
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Bill Gates = a personal hero. I love this e-mail. Microsoft is also a case of spreading things too thin.

[From Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant]
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