One of the podcasts I listen to is Adam Curry‘s Daily Source Code. Today, he did something that’s new to distributing media content, he created a .torrent for his podcast. The idea behind this is that instead of all of his subscribers downloading the same mp3 file from his server, they share from each other. This ultimately lowers bandwidth demands on the server and in some cases may help the file(s) to download faster. The downside to this is that you have to wait till the whole file is downloaded before you can listen to/watch it since it doesn’t download in order but in pieces. This isn’t a major fault since most of the time the files are downloading while I’m sleeping or at work, so when I wake up or come home, they’re completely downloaded. There’s a lot of potential for this type of technology as noted over at this guy’s site.
