Mark Pesce talk is 5 years old, but his observations are still on-target.

Sorry ... but, in the US, the intrusive model he suggests is already in play. Already, the corners of active frames during programming are filled with annoying ads (he calls them "bugs"). Sometimes, the advertiser goes beyond a corner and cuts off half or all of the top or bottom of the active frame for an advertisement.

And between programming, it's already much worse. Split-screens are already confining "credits" for the program to the left half of the screen so the right half can be used to pitch something to consumers.

The model he suggests to "save" television is the very model that's driving me "away" from television. And it could be that others who already use "torrents" to acquire programming do so to escape the bugs. Add the bugs to torrents and you may very well kill the reason behind piracy ... but at the same time, kill the viewer's interest in watching a given program in any distribution.

He suggests that "word of mouth" advertising between friends would spread the popularity of a program. But frankly, if a friend recommended a program to me that was full of "bugs," I'd probably reconsider that friendship.

I'm not certain what the best business model should be for distribution ... but I'm highly skeptical of the business model he suggests being successful.

After looking at the title I wondered what id get myself into when downloading this seminar. Usually there is little thought into why people use bittorrent and for what purpose. Here we have a seminar on why and how and what if for the future. This starts about the technology of today and expands on the ideas of what we will be using in the near future. We currently are moving from being forced to see what people want us to see, to what we want to see right now. The session explains the reasons why this is good for us and possibly good for broadcasters, why should they think more clearly about downloaded tv shows as free advertising and not simple stamping down on it as piracy. The gentleman goes onto show how we can use bittorent and google and broadband options in general to improve the flow of media to users, whilst also keeping the tv execs in a job.
Basically this is a really good talk and would be fun to see in the future when things like this gentleman describes comes into reality, and just see how close he got in predicting it.