Justin F. Chapweske, CEO of Onion Networks gave a presentation at eTech to motivate the need for a better way to transfer very large files across the internet. More than bittorrent or other P2P applications, his proposed swarmstreaming technology promises to greatly reduce the costs and increase the throughput when transferring large amounts of data over the internet.
The talk articulated the problems with current approaches, and briefly described the swarmstream technology; review their web site (linked above) for more information.