It wasn’t even a question of time when this was going to happen: Subscription TV (see http://participatoryculture.org/).
DTV uses the Bittorrent technology to distribute the files. Very clever. So this leaves one question: How to find content? There is this built in channel guide that seems to be similar to the podcast support in iTunes 4.9. But I don’t see centralized channel guides to be the long term solutions. There will be some kind of collective filtering/classification similar to what del.icio.us is for bookmarking that is not requiring hired editors to update a channel guide for thousands of feeds.
And then we need to get rid of several competing del.icio.us-like resource collections by implementing metadata interchange protocols hat allow searching and classification in a P2P network on a global scale.
I am just playing around with the MacOS X Beta of ther DTV client – and it looks fairly easy to use (the iTunes users experience made it’s way into the collective mind of interface designers I’d say…). A side note: the “windows version coming soon” message is some kind of landmark!
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