Cohen is the creator and co-founder of BitTorrent, which is described on the company's Web site as a "free speech tool." It gives users the freedom to access, publish, and distribute big chunks of content online. Cohen became obsessed with finding a solution to the problem of transferring very large files -- movies, TV programming, software, games, and other content -- and in the course of two years, came up with one. The result was BitTorrent.
Cohen's creation was the result of an obsessive focus. His penchant for solving the problem stems in part from his Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism. Often dubbed the "little professor syndrome," it seems to give sufferers extraordinary abilities to focus on complex tasks. The down side is that they fail to pick up on even the most basic social signals and have difficulty engaging in two-way communication.
Cohen's resumé reads like what you would expect from a wünderkind programmer and technophile. He dropped out of college after two years and went to work as a research assistant in artificial intelligence at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey. He's held a variety of software engineering and developer jobs. After the dotcom bust, Cohen turned his focus to solving the problem of large-file transfer. His solution became BitTorrent.
The Business of BitTorrent
"BitTorrent enables broadcast economics on the Web," says Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent's chief operating officer, who's tasked with making BitTorrent a business. "We allow creators of content to make their creation available without the problems of offline media distribution [limited retail shelf space and geographic limitations], and without the concerns associated with online distribution [bandwidth requirements, server strain]," he says, adding, "The result will be millions of entertainment options and very low barriers to entry for creative people to be in the media business."
Navin joined Cohen in 2004 from Yahoo!, where he had worked in corporate development. He sees BitTorrent as a means of turning consumers of content into aides of distribution. "BitTorrent allows a publisher to tap the unused bandwidth resources of its customers, rather than shouldering all of the bandwidth costs itself," Navin says.
By turning each person in BitTorrent's decentralized network into a source for data, bandwidth loads can be made smaller for each, by distributing the source for the file among all of those connected who have that file.
Applications like BitTorrent have far-reaching implications for the future of media. As an alternative channel for media distribution, BitTorrent portends the undermining of existing channels of distribution. Should the video industrial complex -- movie companies and producers of television programming -- worry about the likes of BitTorrent in the way that the music industry fretted over the Napster of yore?
The movie industry seems to have learned from the RIAA's mistake of alienating millions of people by figuring out a way to work with BitTorrent rather than against it. "The opportunities are going to be there to get our content to millions more people," Dan Glickman, president of the MPAA, told Fortune magazine recently. Earlier this year he met with Cohen to suss him out.
For now, content available through BitTorrent is free, and there are no obvious signs that it's monetizing the service. This will not always be the case.
"Publishers can attach a price to their content if they choose. We expect that paid content will find its way into our model soon," Navin says, adding, "More importantly, advertising is an ideal way to support BitTorrent publishers."
Starting in early 2006, BitTorrent will roll out a content-advertiser matching system to help advertisers with viral content "reach people that aren't reachable by TV anymore," Navin says.