BitTorrent killed the TV network star

BitTorrent stands to render the TV network as we know it unneccessary, much the way blogs are changing the way we get our news.

Have you seen the now famous Jon Stewart appearance on CNN's Crossfire from just before the presidential elections? The one where he calls the hosts 'political puppets' refuses to 'be their (comedic) monkey' and calls Tucker Carlson a 'dick'? Chances are if you have, you didn't catch the original broadcast, but downloaded the now famous segment off the web, like I did just last week.

Get this; according to the January issue of Wired magazine, CNN's Crossfire audience is 867,000. At time of publications, over 2.3 MILLION people downloaded the clip via iFilm.com, and an estimated hundreds of thousands more (perhaps many, many more since clips downloaded using BitTorrent are not easily tracked) used BitTorrent to grab the clip imediately after the airing.

This means three times as many people saw the Stewart clip online as on CNN itself.

According to Wired, "Analysts at CacheLogic, an Internet-traffic analysis firm in Cambridge, England, report that BitTorrent traffic accounts for more than one-third of all data sent across the Internet."

We are getting our news and entertainment in different ways now, and BitTorrent technology (and philosophy) is making the change easier for us.

'The BitTorrent Effect': complete Wired article.

Jon Stewart on Crossfire : at iFilm.com

http://bittorrent.com/: BitTorrent Homepage