SpeedBit's Incredible Shrinking Download
The Israeli company says its new accelerator can download a film inside 20 minutes. If true, this could revolutionize the online video industry
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Downloading a movie or a TV episode over the Internet and watching it in the comfort of your own home may become the next major consumer trend. But even with a high-speed Net connection, a full-length movie clocking in at 1.5 gigabytes still takes hours to buy and download.
Industry analysts concede that this remains the major roadblock preventing online video from catching on as quickly as music did. After all, even compressed movie files are at least 100 times larger than a song. Now an Israeli startup called SpeedBit says it has devised a solution that can dramatically accelerate video downloading over the Net—potentially opening the door to much wider use of the technology.