For the longest time, I’ve had this idea on my get-rich quick million-dollar programming ideas list but today I found out that someone’s already done it. Long story: Internet TV Streaming is fine and all, but it just doesn’t work, especially in the US because of the copyright crap. Centralized distribution of content is just a bad idea because, eventually, someone has to take the blame for it. So, I thought of applying decentralized P2P protocols to movies and TV which would be entirely possible. Let’s say there are 100 publishers with distribution centers around the world that publish TV content. While these guys are downloading content from the distribution server, they’re simultaneously uploading what they’ve got to other watchers. The video is encoded in a streaming-enabled format and sliced into bits. The earlier bits are given more priority and, with a few seconds of waiting, you can stream TV while sharing it over the P2P network. It’s Bittorrent without the wait. Youtube without the, well, youtube part. I assumed that this didn’t exist yet because nothing similar to P2P streaming is popular in the US. But holy crap, China has had P2PTV for like, ever. Why are we so slow to catch on? It’s amazing enough that someone had the brains to successfully implement this idea, and I mean successful as hell because even my parents use the crap. But what’s more amazing is that this isn’t widespread through the US. On the radio, I heard this white guy talking about American education and he was like, “it’s not like indians [the asian ones] are smarter than us”. (heh) But seriously, China is rising rapidly, not because of cheap labor or extreme education standards, but because they’ve got the balls to get shit done. QQ USA.