Just let BitTorrent save the day.

It seems like BitTorrent has a bad image. Mainstream business don't seem to even consider it as a useful tool. But they should... seriously.

I'm a giant dork, and as such, I like public radio. I always listen to This American Life in podcast form. As of late Ira Glass has been making a little speech as the beginning of the show reminding everyone that Chicago Public Radio spends $150,000 each year on just the bandwidth for the podcast, and could we maybe kick in a couple bucks? I give money to public radio, but most people don't. I can see how this would be distressing in these rough economic times.

Here's the deal though... why not just release the show on BitTorrent instead of direct downloads? Maybe they can still offer the DDL on the website, but ask people to use the torrent as it helps save money. This seems like a perfectly reasonable delivery model.

Microsoft can take a lesson here as well. Just yesterday they underestimated the popularity of the public beta of Windows 7. They had to take it down for the better part of a day while they dealt with "very heavy traffic". So a few new servers later all is well. But at what cost? If they had instead posted a .torrent file and set up a tracker, everything would have been fine. The beta was, of course, available on torrents without Microsoft's consent (if you knew where to look). But why couldn't Microsoft just provide people with a legitimate .torrent file that everyone knew was the real deal?