Software whiz Bram Cohen released BitTorrent for free on the Internet in 2002 so his hippie friends could swap concert videos. The first big success was a Grateful Dead concert.
Today, Cohen's peer-to-peer technology is so popular and powerful that it accounts at times for 50 percent of Internet data traffic, and has the potential to alter the economics of broadband Internet for companies like Comcast Corp. and millions of consumers.
"Television is going to get phased out," Cohen, 32, a formerly out-of-work computer programmer, said in a phone interview from San Francisco. The future, he said, is Internet video at home. "People get broadband because they want to get stuff. That's the whole point of broadband."
But Comcast Corp. says the Internet is a limited commodity and that BitTorrent video users hog bandwidth, many times with pirated movies, and slow speeds for others.
Some Internet video leads to congested nodes on Comcast's network, and the company has admitted to interfering with BitTorrent traffic to ease jams. It says a small number of BitTorrent users abuse the Internet. A federal government agency is investigating Comcast's actions.
Comcast and BitTorrent Inc., which have clashed publicly for months, were in negotiations to settle their disagreements late last week, sources from both sides said on condition they not be identified. An announcement could come this week, they say.
The Comcast-BitTorrent dispute is an early indicator of the stresses and opportunities of online video, a rapidly growing market. Cable companies are considering how to bill for it, the government is trying to figure out whether it should be regulated, companies are developing new technologies for it, and network operators are adding equipment to handle it.
Time Warner Cable, the nation's second-largest cable company, will experiment this year with consumption-based, or metered, pricing for broadband in Beaumont, Texas. The company notes that 5 percent of its customers use 50 percent of the bandwidth in some areas of the network. Comcast executives are watching the experiment.
Projecting the size of the video explosion has become its own industry. Technology researchers warn that many exabytes of video -- an exaflood -- will surge over the Internet with high-definition movie downloads, interactive phones, games, virtual online worlds, amateur video, and Internet TV.
One exabyte of data contains the text and pictures of one trillion big books that, stacked one on top of the other, would reach 13 million miles into the heavens.
Bret Swanson and George Gilder of the Discovery Institute, a nonpartisan public policy think tank based in Seattle, project the Internet will grow by 50 times by 2015. Swanson estimated that network operators will have to spend $100 billion in the U.S. Internet by 2012 to keep pace.
After slowing earlier in the decade, Internet capacity needs are growing 80 percent to 100 percent a year, said Philippe Morin, an executive with Nortel Networks, a networks-equipment manufacturing firm. Consumers, he said, "have this want for everything HD."
Christopher S. Yoo, professor of law and communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said, "The predictions about video are quite real." Some people, Yoo said, "are afraid of how big it will be."
