BitTorrent is going to be a BIG revolution

I have been reflecting about this for many months now. How come that there is still no VC money behind the BitTorrent project (downloads here)? I truly believe that it has an enormous potential to disrupt the Internet and traditional streaming business models as much as Napster in its time or Skype nowadays.

What is BitTorrent: the full introduction is on this HTML 1.0-like page. It is a project maintained by a single person: Bram Cohen (home page, blog, resume). I really have trouble believing there is not more happening around him.

Why am I interested?

Well on the content provider side, it helps speed up delivery of content, and reduces potentially significantly the amount of bandwidth you have to buy to deliver content. French TV M6 for example is delivering its online music clips with Torrent technology. This site supporting Kerry, delivers speeches and clips with the technology. You can download the latest version of Mandrake linux thru the torrent. The list goes on...

On the user side, one should probably work on a slicker interface, but the technology has all the benefits of a P2P technology to speed up delivery.

Again, this is not about a technology encouraging piracy, but about a technology helping move the digital revolution forward. DivX was first considered evil, until it became embedded in all new DVD players around the world, and is considered one of the best encoding formats around. I believe BitTorrent has the same potential.

So who's investing in BitTorrent to make it a great company ? Am I missing something ?
Such as Bram giving it all away to society ? :o) well... his choice.

Update: I have just been through Bram's blog: a pure mathematician's dream: argorithm theory, game theory and the like. Reminds me of my worst nightmares at engineering school trying to compute algorithm complexity: was it converging at n² speed, or 2n... Anyways, the man seems to enjoy himself, and is certainly at the right place at Berkeley. Keep it up Bram!

Update 2 on 13/3/05: the Red Herring is running an article on BitTorrent this week.

Extracts:
"it’s the kind of opportunity that venture capitalists drool over.
According to Mr. Navin, several tier-one venture capitalists—he wouldn’t name names—are courting BitTorrent as the company seeks out Series A funding."

"Mr. Nevin names cache management, publishing, and enterprise business solutions as potential BitTorrent revenue streams. The

United Kingdom

’s CacheLogic has already picked up that thread. CacheLogic’s network and server hardware for ISPs deals with the massive problem of P2P traffic overload by caching specific data—for example, torrents—and serving it locally.
That’s more efficient, cost-effective, and user-friendly than the traditional solution of throttling traffic. According to CacheLogic spokesman Nicholas Farka, “The future is in legitimate content distribution via P2P. Besides selling our products, we are moving into analysis. In the last year, we started analyzing data from our monitoring network and exploring strategies for distributing video content."