BitTorrent in Developing Countries

Where bandwidth is plentiful it’s become a curse to the media industry. The television studios hate it because people don’t need TiVo when the latest episode of Lost is available on PirateBay the day (or only hours) after it airs. Hollywood hates it because when movies leak, it’s a virtually untraceable way for the culprits to cover there tracks while sharing content with millions. The music industry hates it because…well they hate anything that allows people to asynchronously share music without paying for it. So Bittorrent and peer-to-peer sharing in general is the bane of the majority of the media industry, highly destructive and incredibly disruptive to a ninety year old business model. In Africa and other developing countries I see a real and immediate value for bittorrent.

It goes without saying that bandwidth is precious. So what is bit torrent and why should more developmental groups adopt it as means of distributing software?

Oh, Virtuous Torrenting

BitTorrent is a file-sharing protocol that enables the download of large files using minimum Internet bandwidth in less a mounts of time than normal bandwidth. It maximizes transfer speed by gathering portions of the transferred file and downloading multiple pieces concurrently from people who already have them.

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