The forthcoming South by Southwest music and film conferences will deliver music compilations and movie trailers using BitTorrent’s P2P technology.
Packages containing the movie and music from SXSW should be available for much faster downloading this year. The conference and BitTorrent announced how packages available for download let visitors check out the bands and the films in advance.
A link from the SXSW homepage leads to the packages. 713 MP3s showcasing the bands fill a 2.5GB torrent, while 83 film trailers occupy a 667 MB torrent package; over fifty of the film trailers will be their world premieres. The huge file sizes for both packages almost require a BitTorrent to deliver them.
“With the amount of bandwidth it takes to make such massive digital files available over the Internet to SXSW fans worldwide, we would simply not be able to do it effectively without BitTorrent,” SXSQ CTO Scott Wilcox said in a statement.
BitTorrent president Ashwin Navin was equally pleased with the arrangement, the second time BitTorrent has done so for SXSW. “BitTorrent, as the free and open standard for cooperative distribution technology, is a natural fit for what everyone hopes to achieve at the festival, and bring the expression to a global audience,” Navin said.
South by Southwest has been embracing technology more with each successive year. Soon, the site will post an iPod-friendly 2006 SXSW Click Guide online to download. Festival attendees equipped with Palm OS or Windows Mobile devices will be able to grab a similar guide for their platforms, too.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
