I2 and the Big Screen

Since my last post had to do with a movie, I decided to look around and see if there was any kind of Internet2-Entertainment Industry collaboration going on. I found a few articles, one of which can be found here:

http://news.com.com/Hollywood+seeks+Internet2+tests,+P2P+oversight/2100-1026_3-5458537.html

The most interesting aspect of this article was easily the statistics. Although we have talked about, read, and viewed many performances and articles discussing the potential and implications of I2, nothing really says it more impressively than this quote:

"...of a network powerful enough to allow a full DVD to be transferred even faster than an ordinary MP3 might be today.

Recently, researchers successfully sent data from Switzerland to Tokyo at speeds of 7.21 gigabits per second. That was enough speed to transfer a full-length DVD anywhere in the world in less than five seconds, researchers said."

The Motion Picture Association of America has been talking to I2 for about a year now, and although this article is brief, it does point out that a main focus of the talks has been piracy.

And this is quite a hot topic these days. Quoting from the above article, the following link presents an interesting discussion of the implications of such a collaboration:

http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=16486&page=1#31435

This same article can also be found at:

http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000674.html

And from the post:

"No Hollywood exec is going to sanction a business model that lets Joe User download a movie onto a hard drive faster than the time it takes to launch his Web browser. Forget streaming video on demand. Hell, that isn't even enough time to watch a BMW ad.

The technology behind Internet2 *breaks* anything remotely resembling a broadcast business model, which is why the MPAA will do its best to disarm the technology by installing Digital Rights Management directly in its routers to stop interesting
content from ever getting into the pipeline."

And to anyone who doesn't think this issue is already making real national headlines, who perhaps has already forgotten the lawsuits about illegal music downloading:

http://p2pnet.net/index.php?page=reply&story=4527

or

http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3550836

Most of the people I tell about our project have never heard of I2 and therefore are completely ignorant of its incredible potential to unify and/or divide. Looks like that won't be the case much longer.