HDNet’s Mark Cuban is skeptical about the future prospects of BitTorrent technology for the distribution of large media files.

He cites several reasons:

• Conflicting Clients. There are a ton of clients, with the number growing all the time. Although they work on basically the same source code and protocols, they all install and operate as if they had exclusive access. They want to control the PC so that they are in charge of what resources are available. At some point they get considered to be malware and the clients will get uninstalled
• End Users dont understand how P2P works, and once they do, they get concerned about giving up bandwidth. Most users dont know how to go in and edit the default settings. So even if they settle on a single client and are happy with just the content available on that network or to that client, they arent going to be happy about their banwidth being in constant use to save a content provider money .
• The P2P model of seeding is a huge problem for those using wireless broadband with bandwidth constraints or per bit or per minute costs. People are going to wake up and find that they owe Verizon, Sprint, whoever a lot more than they ever thought possible because they installed a client on their laptops. That could lead to these networks blocking the protocol.
• There is a misconception that there is bandwidth savings for the end user. If you want to download a 1gb size file, 1gb of data will be delivered to your PC. There is no savings of bandwidth on the client side. In fact, the client is charged a bandwidth premium because after they have received the entire file, they are asked to particpate in the peering by delivering parts of the file to other users.

Cuban view may be influenced by his investment in traditional television, but BitTorrent hasn’t seen the widespread adoption of some file-sharing technologies, possibly because the publisher benefits more than then end user.

via TorrentFreak