Brennan’s Blog

New hosting services in the cloud like Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure could make for solid torrent servers. Podcast and screencast services like .NET Rocks and dnrTV produce content which is pulled down primarily with torrent feeds. Typically services which release new content do so on a schedule and hit suddenly with a considerable amount of traffic which makes torrents the best option. But then there are times after most users have all of the latest content and the servers sit idle, or worse yet, there is a limited number of seeding servers which causes delays during peak periods for all users. With these new "cloud" services it could be possible to fire up supporting extra seed servers during peak periods and power them down when they are not needed.

The appeal that I see with Amazon WS is the fact that the charges are accumulated by the hour. Amazon WS also has an API to allow developers to create control systems to manage their virtual servers. With the API you could fire up the additional seed servers as new content is pushed to the primary seeding server to replicate the content ahead of publishing the new torrent content in the RSS feed used by torrent clients like µTorrent.

And hosting content is not that expensive. I recently saw hosting for 1 terabyte of bandwidth for about $7 a month. That is really quite cheap if someone wanted to produce their own audio or video content and make it available on a minimal budget. It should not be necessary to rely solely on YouTube to host your video content. You could produce quality video and host it yourself on a virtual servers in the cloud and not have to deal with the low quality video that YouTube is still using. Services like hulu.com are pretty impressive. I have been watching full screen movies on my 37" LCD with my attached LCD TV and it is better quality than Time Warner cable.

Connect the dots and you can see that the traditional media distribution mechanisms are already far out of date.