Torrents have been used over the years mainly as a way to effectively share content with other users who are also interested in that piece of content, using all the bandwidth of the connected parties in order to deliver that content to one another. Videos, photos, e-books and software have all be download and uploaded on torrents for years, but a new service may change how we look at torrents forever.
BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen is announcing today a live streaming video service that he believes will revolutionize the online streaming world. BitTorrent Live allows people to stream content through BitTorrent and the more people that tune in, the better the quality becomes, which is the complete opposite of traditional online video streams.
Since the service will use those watching in order to help strengthen its broadcast, this will effectively eliminate the need for the person who is hosting the video to worry about bandwidth costs as well as infrastructure barriers. This is quite an important technology as, in theory, it could make the days of buffering online videos a thing of the past, that is, as long as there are enough people watching the same thing you are.