Saturday, December 31, 2005
P2P will save the telcos
Telcos are laying fiber like crazy, hoping that video-on-demand will fly, but here is another option for them:
Regular people are becoming mega content generators - writing blogs, taking pictures, audioblogging, videoblogging, mixing their own music, creating their own videos. They are also sharing more of their content than ever before - narrowly (photos) and widely (blogs).
The exciting part is that because of search engines, they are finding an ever-larger audience. For example, this blog gets 4 to 5 visitors every day via search engines. Yet, the content generators are not getting much benefit out of their own content. The benefits are most going to the search engines and aggregators of various kinds.
By letting individuals serve their own content through P2P networks rather than through centralized sites such as Flickr or Blogger, telcos can get a piece of the content action, and can help individuals make more of the money that is currently going exclusively to Google and others. It won't be easy - but the telcos have the wherewithal to make it work.
