The Macintosh rumor site
MacOSRumors.com is reporting that the next version of Mac OS X will employ a BitTorrent driven iTunes. The story is probably buried under online advertising, so you’ll have to work to read it… You know, close the pop-up window, now close the hover window, and it’s next to the 10 Google ads. Hmmm, knowing them it’s probably under 3 more pop up advertisements.
This is just a rumor and Apple rumors are rarely correct, but this particular item is very interesting and near and dear to me. At Technology Evangelist we have dabbled in distributing high definition videos online via bit torrent and have even highlighted a key application called
Democracy Player. Lets make the assumption that this rumor is true (just go with it for now) and that Apple will be releasing a torrent engine in the Mac OS X 10.5 version of iTunes. What does this mean and why?
Right now Apple offers a couple of full-length movies in the iTunes music store as well as a series of sitcoms for a very reasonable $1.99 per episode. The only problem with the videos in the iTunes music store is that they are fairly low quality. While the compression is excellent the actual resolution is too low. The resolution of the videos encoded in the iTunes music store is closer to a VHS movie than a DVD and it shows when watching anything full screen. Apple could increase the resolution, but the higher the resolution the more bandwidth that is required to keep the file looking nice. By the time we hit 1080p resolutions the file size becomes hugegantic. Rather than a 300MB file to download we’re talking about Gigabytes. Not only will Apple have to eat the bandwidth cost, but the download time would be less than favorable.
Enter torrents. Allowing users to download videos via a built-in and seamless torrent engine would take a lot of the bandwidth load off of the iTunes music store as well as speed up the video downloads. Since I’m on a cable modem anyone with the torrent enabled iTunes on my same subnet can upload the file to be a Gbps speeds rather than Mbps or Kbps speeds, so a lot faster than the current iTunes bandwidth model. A LOT faster.
And that brings me to my secret little dream… If Apple creates a torrent engine in iTunes it would be great if anyone could take advantage of it. Since the Technology Evangelist podcasts are already distributed via torrents and the files are already HDTV quality, adding our torrent feed to iTunes would be a natural fit. Podcasting in a torrent enabled iTunes would help keep our bandwidth costs reasonably low and the speed of the download fairly high. The key would be allowing Podcasters to utilize the torrent engine as well as adding that feature to all versions of iTunes, Windows included.
I’m hoping that MacOSRumors.com is correct, but I won’t be holding my breath. While torrents are a great way to distribute content I’m not so sure that Hollywood will be very keen on that idea, right or wrong. Only time will tell. What do you think? Is MacOSRumors right, or are they just making stuff up again in hopes that you’ll accidentally click on one of those annoying pop-up ads?
1. Posted by: Doug Adams on May 3, 2006 3:37 PM:
The story is probably buried under online advertising, so you?｢どｨび｢ll have to work to read it?｢どｨｬｶ You know, close the pop-up window, now close the hover window, and it?｢どｨび｢s next to the 10 Google ads.
Pop-up window? Hover window? Google ads? Where? Get a Mac!