9 March 2005: Slow

Broadband set to revolutionise TV, say the BBC.

Have they been reading my blog or what?

Meantime, I've been somewhat surprised to read that BitTorrent now accounts for 35% of all internet traffic. Well, why did BT think all those people want broadband? There aren't that many of us baseball fans out there to eat up the kind of bandwidth they're providing. As with football and, for a few years, baseball, the problem is not so much the technology being available but the holders of the rights to in-demand content being able to stop their product being made available from someone else.

One area, perhaps, where live sport can offer some security: you can download the latest episode of 24 from the web the day after it's shown in the US, and that's fine. But with sport, users really want to watch it as it happens, meaning unless people start pirate broadcasts from within, or hack into satellite streams and re-broadcast on the web (as actually does happen at the moment with Premiership games), there's less of a window of opportunity for your average hacker. They'll find a way, sure, but online broadcasts of sport are, just perhaps, more likely to be a money-spinner than almost any other kind of content you'd care to mention.