P2P C'est Mon PVR

A couple of interesting things have come up as a result of my now-infamous post on Blog Torrent for The Broadband Daily (final score from yesterday was: readers 7100 - server 0, with 5000 or so readers left unfulfilled - not bad for a sell-side analyst).

Firstly, a highly-valued French reader clues me in to a post today on French P2P site Ratiatum about the correlation between linear television programming and search queries/downloads on eDonkey. If your French is like mine, you will need the "translate" function on Google, which renders something like Beowulf in the original. But persevere. The authors tracked episodes of television programs aired on French TV and found that in some cases the level of interest in downloading these titles doubled or trebled within one to two days. Interestingly, they seem to speculate at the end of the piece about the potential to harness the unprecedented demand they have observed in the French market into some sort of subscription on-demand service.

The other piece which interests me (from the comments section of The Broadband Daily) is the lengthy post on new-to-me blog j/turn which gives some first-hand user insights into Bredbandsbolaget in Stockholm and how the secret to the success of P2P in the real world is symmetrical access.

Tomorrow I'm set to appear on a "TV-over-DSL" panel at the bombastically named "European Media Leaders Summit" co-hosted by Informa Media and PricewaterhouseCoopers, and while I genuinely like some of the other people on the panel, I'm also eager to introduce the French market information into the mix and see what happens - sometimes good guys don't wear white.