P2P - IPTV Killer App?

According to Slashdot, the guys over at Cornell have devised something REALLY interesting. It's a plug-in for a bit torrent client called Azureus that "Listens" to the torrents you're on and the responds to search queries, and is decentralized, read: immune from the traditional legal actions on companys like The Pirate Bay and Oink. From the project Website:

What is it?
Cubit is a system that provides fully decentralized approximate keyword search capabilities to Azureus as a standard plugin. Approximate search means that you can use Cubit to find a movie, song or artist even if you don't know which spelling variation is used in the title or in her name. It gives you what you mean instead of what you asked for exactly, and returns the best results in the network in only a few seconds.

How does it work?
Cubit creates alongside BitTorrent a lightweight peer-to-peer network designed from the ground up to enable rapid and accurate approximate searches. It performs the searches without relying on any centralized components, and therefore is immune to legal and technical attacks targeting torrent aggregators. Additional technical details can be found in the approach section.

So what does this have to do with IPTV? Well, in order for truly interactive IPTV to take off, it's going to need a Killer App. eMail was the Killer App for internet adoption, Napster was the Killer App for broadband adoption, and YouTube, arguably, the Killer App for the online-video revolution.

IPTV has a few things going for it, but even more hurdles. On the plus side, it's a way around your cable company's bundled programming and anti-competitive practices, it's a lean-back entertainment delivery technology, and it's got the potential to deliver a LOT more than traditional cable experiences. On the down side, content on IPTV is limited to movie and TV show rental and sales, scrapes of online video experiences, and a fractured distribution community that can't figure out a licensing model with the major content producers, who don't want to risk relationships with Cable Co's. Moreover, there's no compelling reason for anyone to buy into IPTV; there's no Killer App.

What happens, though if you combine the power of Peer-to-peer, 'Napster' like experiences with lean back entertainment? Until now, you haven't been able to - mostly because the experience was so horrific and torrenting really required a PC/web browser. But if you look at this closely, you begin to realize that the right ingredients for a Killer App are brewing here.

Mix in some IPTV-geared service architectures, Long Tail filtering and niche content distribution potential and it seems like there's a recipe here for a lean-back killler app experience.

Link to Cubit project page