It's a distributed solution. Technology Review website:
BitTorrent was created three years ago by programmer Bram Cohen, who came up with the idea while working on an open source content-distribution project called Mojo Nation. BitTorrent relies on a concept called “swarming distribution,” in which files such as movies and songs aren’t transferred in one piece from one person’s hard drive to another. Rather, small bits of a file are pulled from many users’ hard drives and reassembled by the program on the requester’s computer.Posted by jackhodgson at October 19, 2004 12:07 PM