Matt sent me a link to this: DTV: Internet TV, so I downloaded it and gave it a try. I think it's really promising. We've known for a while that BitTorrent and RSS can make a good way to distribute large files, but this open-source project has wrapped it all up in a nice, pretty package, so that the John Q. End-User can download the app, browse the channel guide, subscribe to a show and watch it without knowing anything about BT clients, seeding, trackers, etc. It's even got a built in media player. It's in beta for the Mac only now, but there's a Windows version coming soon.

What's more, you can install their web app called Broadcast Machine and it will help you publish your videos and enter them in the channel guide. It even provides a BitTorrent tracker and server seeding.

This will be great for indy video producers and video bloggers. I subscribed to Diggnation and watched an episode over lunch today. But I assume it could also be used for slightly more nefarious purposes. There are already people that copy TV shows into digital formats and publish them via BitTorrent. Now if someone creates an RSS feed that points to all the torrent files for that show, then you could subscribe to it in DTV and the new episodes would appear in your playlist, as if you had a TiVo on your computer.

Cable and satellite customers have been clamoring for a la carte channels for years. This would let you actually get shows a la carte. It really would be like TiVo, except without live TV. If I were a network exec, I would come to terms with the fact that there's not really any way to stop this. The pieces have been coming together for a few years, and a project like DTV is all that's been missing. I would take some initiate and start releasing shows (with commercials) online in this format. Your customer is basically offering to distribute the content for free. Sure, someone could make a rogue feed that has your file that has been stripped of ads. As the networks move more toward product placement, that will become a moot point.

At any rate, this will be a project to watch.