• Forbes.com, Wednesday, October 10, 2007 12 PM

BitTorrent, founder of modern (illegal) file-sharing, is reinventing itself once again. In its bid to turn straight, the company's new plan, introduced this year, is to help media companies stream videos over the Internet--which is a little weird, as Forbes' Andy Greenberg points out. "[The] company whose name has long meant digital piracy to content owners now wants to be the online media industry's humble servant," he says.

BitTorrent on Tuesday introduced a new product called the Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA), which distributes the task of streaming or downloading video among many computers in a given network, leveraging collective bandwidth to deliver it faster--10 to 50 percent faster, according to the company, while costing less than content delivery services like Akamai. The online video provider Brightcove has signed on to use the new product.

Lower-cost and more efficient delivery is a great thing, but some analysts aren't impressed. Radar Research's Aram Sinnreich declares that "Peer-to-peer isn't the savior of the online video industry." Indeed, what we have here is a chicken and egg problem: as a business, Internet TV hasn't figured itself out yet--what models work, whom to partner with, how to deal with competition from user-generated content, etc. An unestablished business isn't ready for greater efficiencies.

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