Cringley at the PBS peers into the future of online video. This is a great article on the challenges of delivering online video of reasonable quality at a large scale.

Just carrying all the viewers of “Desperate Housewives” at the current iTunes resolution won’t be economically viable for another decade according to Moore’s Law.

I am no Luddite. IP is the future of global communication on all levels. But adding video to the mix is so bandwidth intensive that using current techniques will push back total IP conversion for decades.

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And that brings me back to the peer-to-peer schemes I discussed a little last week. By using excess upload capacity of client nodes as repeaters, putting together 64 gigabits-per-second actually isn’t that hard. Stealing 256 kilobits per client would require a total of 256,000 participating clients to do the job, which is only 2.5 percent of the total “Desperate Housewives” viewer population.

Having seen the quality of existing pirate P2P video services like PPLive , I couldn’t agree more on the high potential of developing a legal alternative that delivers the variety and quality of video programming that online users are craving for.

Via Rodrigo Sepulveda, who is struggling with hard drive capacity issues of his own for his extensive personal video collection for his timely vpod.tv startup.