Broadcatching

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In December of 2003, the term Broadcatching was used by Steve Gillmor to describe the combination of RSS feeds and BitTorrent peer to peer file sharing as a method for subscribing to an ongoing series of media files from a website. The combination of these technologies allows a computer connected to the Internet to act like a digital video recorder (DVR) such as TiVo connected to cable.

The term Broadcatch was originally coined by Fen Labalme in 1983. It was used to describe the concept of an automated agent that could aggregate and filter content from multiple sources for presentation to an individual user.

Broadcatching provides a web based distribution channel capable of delivering broadcast media to a large group of consumers at a low cost. BitTorrent provides the low cost method for distributing large files to a large group, and RSS enables a website to easily provide a subscription to a series of BitTorrent files.

Similar to Linspire, the system leans on the cost-saving benefit of BitTorrent, where expenses are virtually non-existent; each downloader of a file also contributes to a portion of the distribution. On the other hand, properly implemented multicasting would provide the same functionality with even smaller amounts of bandwidth.

Despite ample discussion, one of the first practical applications of this idea has only surfaced recently. Programmer Andrew Grumet has announced the release of a beta version of an RSS and BitTorrent integration tool for Radio Userland's news aggregator, available here.

TV RSS is another solution.

Azureus has also an RSS feed-reader plug-in which can be used in conjunction with the sites mentioned above.

Podcasting is starting to integrate BitTorrent to help podcasters deal with the download demands of their MP3 "radio" programs. Specifically, iPodder supports BitTorrent for the RSS 2.0 enclosures that power podcasting. Also X Hollywood aggregates RSS feeds from BitTorrent sites.

RSS-TorrentFlux is an Add-On for TorrentFlux enabling it to use RSS-Feeds for automated downloading.

WritTorrent provides RSS 2.0 feeds for the Azureus BT tracker, and a plugin for automatic blog publishing of .torrent files.

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