Ahh, I was right. The coolest stuff at CES is over at the Sands. Too bad Dave Winer left before he could get over there. And I’m not talking about the adult entertainment convention that’s going on there right now either.
As an example over there I dropped in on Verisign’s booth. It’s very easy to miss what they are now shipping: a Netflix killer.
Here’s what they were demoing: a peer-to-peer system for selling and distributing high-def videos. It really rocks. I downloaded a movie while there in the booth and the quality wasn’t distinguishable from the HD-DVD’s I get from Netflix.
It made me realize why would any of us go into a Blockbuster in the future, or wait two days for a DVD to show up from Netflix.
There are several companies that are trying to do the same thing as Verisign — distribute videos over P2P networks to reduce distribution cost and improve time to get a movie to you.
The problem is that those networks require users to load some software on their machines. Anytime I hear that I realize that getting people to do that is going to be difficult.
But on Monday Verisign announced a deal with Adobe who’ll distribute their P2P infrastructure along with the next version of the Flash player. That’ll get it into tons of homes nearly overnight.
Translation: Netflix and Blockbuster have a LOT to be worried about.

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