The coming convergence of RSS and P2P (i.e. BitTorrent) could become of what some people are calling the poor man's TiVo. The PVR Blog explains the idea:
BitTorrent allows you to share the downloading of large files with thousands of other people that have the file but there's no easy way to search for new torrent files. RSS is a summary file for sites that can let you know when a site or page has updated automatically when using a RSS reader.
If BitTorrent sites used RSS, you could essentially have much of the functionality of TiVo ("Give me all new episodes of Six Feet Under this year") on your personal computer, without the need for television. Of course, the legal issues around this type of technology would kind of make it impossible to do for very long, but it's perhaps a glimpse into the future of where entertainment could be going.
A legal version of this idea could be soon available when BBC starts making its content available through the Internet Media Player.
1. A while ago, Yahoo had a storry about RSS and Bittorrent convergence, and it was picked up by slashdot. You can get Suprnova and Torrentz listings currently via RSS. I think it's *really* damn handy, and yes, who knows for how long. Given the syndicated nature of both technologies, each could benefit... the more distributed a .torrent, the faster everyone's download will be.
Posted at 4:45AM on Dec 19th 2005 by thom