Paul Kapustka's Blog

With "on the air" lights, high-definition monitors for the audience and a sound stage setting, the full day of speakers and panels included top names from the established media industry (including the Washington Post) as well as industry disrupters, including BitTorrent inventor and company CEO Bram Cohen.

In his industry perspective presentation, Cohen said that other video distribution models -- such as video-rental stores who physically stack DVDs on shelves -- "have no way of competing with IP" networks, which have no limit to the amount of content they can make available.

"In the long run, [IP] is the only way to go," Cohen said, allowing anyone who wants to distribute video or film to do it online.

"The good news is that it opens up distribution to anyone," Cohen said, paving the way for the viewing of the many independent films, documentaries or student projects that never make it into big theaters or onto mainstream broadcast networks.

Dmitry Shapiro, CEO of online video-sharing entity Veoh, predicted that many business models will emerge for the nascent industry, which has attracted plenty of interest but not that much in revenues.

"There will be lots of models to monetize content," Shapiro said, including both ad-supported (free to the viewer) as well as subscription-based services.

Cohen, who said that BitTorrent will "soon" release a tool to help people publish things like full-length films more easily, said that peer-to-peer distribution schemes like BitTorrent's will be necessary for the foreseeable future, especially as more high-definition programming surfaces.

"Right now, [the quality of] video on the Net is terrible, and there's still a ways to go for streaming video to be cheap," Cohen said.