Why p2p in a browser

When Opera announced BitTorrent
support within the
browser (two years ago!), it never made sense to me. After attending
Dr. Satish Menon’s “Video Goes
Viral”
talk yesterday, I am convinced that is the way to go.

The funny thing is that there are no benefits to the user, if
anything, it is a downside for the user because the user’s upload
bandwidth is going to be used most of the time (because of the p2p
connectivity). However, it is a balancer for the network as a whole as
the traffic is distributed, and it would’ve prevented the cricket
website’s servers from melting when the World cup starts next week. If
that sounded like gobbledygook, Kazaa’s help page on
p2p is a good start.

One of the interesting things that Dr. Satish mentioned was that there
is a prediction that in 2010, 80-90% of the traffic on the internet
will be video. I am highly skeptical about that since the internet as
we know it is useful mostly for information and communication, and
information is mostly text. Unless everyone starts video chatting or,
like Dr. Satish described, everyone is watching videos on the TV and
the video is streamed via the internet. That is way into the future.

And that is the clincher why Yahoo! and Google are interested in
video technologies – so that they can put ads in the 80-90% on videos.
After all, internet is accessible by only 6% of people (I don’t know
if this is US-only numbers or worldwide that he mentioned) and TV is
accessible by more than 90% of the people… that’s a lot of
money.

I am starting to see the value of Apple
TV now. I wonder how people can
predict such things (and consequently work on such products) – does it
require some amazing insight or does it just require experience in the
industry or keeping your ears to the ground or is it something else?