A review copy of BitTorrent Dummies arrived in my mail box today. Written by Susannah Gardner and Kris Krug, the book is a designed as a reference for using BitTorrent to share and download massive files that are now becoming so much more common with the advent of audio and video on the web.

How does BitTorrent apply to podcasting? What BitTorrent may do is permit us to create our own subscriber based Internet TV stations, post high resolution documentaries or even feature films that you subscribe to using BitTorrent.

I'll write more about BitTorrent For Dummies in the next week. In the meantime, one of the bext examples I've run across about BitTorrent and its applications comes from the Participatory Culture Foundation, which offiers the Broadcast Machine. What Moore is talking about is the natural fit that comes with media and shared, collective networks. That to me is the power of BitTorrent. But is it difficult to use? I've been intrigued by video podcasts as of late. I guess this is opportunity to start posting a few video shorts, using the principles about BitTorrent I learn in the book. We'll see how it goes.

From the Apple Blog's interview with David Moore:

BitTorrent is a pillar of our internet TV platform, precisely because it makes it affordable to broadcast really amazing video. With bittorrent, you don’t need to be a huge broadcaster anymore to be able to reach millions of people… that’s what makes internet TV such an exciting medium and such a level playing field.

Our Broadcast Machine bittorrent publishing software offers that kind of scalability, so that whether you’re publishing video just to your family or to hundreds of thousands of viewers, you don’t have to worry about high bandwidth costs. In that way, even though we sometimes use the analogy that internet TV is like “podcasting for video,” there’s a fundamental difference between self-publishing audio and video. Creators could probably afford to publish a high-quality podcast via HTTP download on their website. But they couldn’t necessarily afford to do the same for a long, high-resolution video — which is why bittorrent is such an important part of the equation. If you’re a documentary filmmaker and you want to put high-resolution video out there, bittorrent is by far the most affordable way of doing it. Or if you simply want to broadcast a video blog from your living room, bittorrent is a way to do it with peace of mind that it’s virtually free.

Internet TV is still an emerging medium, so there will be a lot more publishing and viewing options to come. What we’re working on with Broadcast Machine and DTV is to ensure that there’s a free and open-source platform available to users, that’s built on open-standards like BitTorrent, RSS, and VLC. As we’ve seen with Mozilla’s products, often times the open-source applications are able to take the lead, and we think that’s the best-case scenario for internet TV.