It’s remarkable on my timing of quiting and joining a podcasting/videoblog company. One thing I hoped for was a breakthrough on distribution of large files. Why? Because of cost. Remember at Channel 9? Most of my video was about 200MB each. Some of my video had been downloaded 100,000 times or more. How much does it cost to distribute a gigabyte? About a $1. Let’s say you’re Google or MSN or Yahoo. Well, you probably get a killer rate, maybe about 1/10th that, but it still costs SOMETHING to get bits from my machines to yours.
Today Red Swoosh came to the rescue.
It will let me distribute large files to you for a far reduced cost. They claim free, but I’ll say “nearly free.”
I got an early looksie at RedSwoosh and it looks like Bittorrent for the rest of us. Easy to implement. Easy to use. Which isn’t always true of Bittorrent. And, first time visitors have a good experience (RedSwoosh has servers so that you’ll always be able to get files, even if you don’t have RedSwoosh loaded).
So, what’s the catch? Well, it’s an advertising supported network. Someone has to pay for the production of RedSwoosh and the initial servers that kickstart the system.
This is a big deal. TechCrunch has the details.