Is BitTorrent the test market for 'The Super Network'?

Perhaps the TV studios and movie studios have not been cracking down on the use of bittorrent as a distribution protocol so that they can watch and use its geek user base as a testing ground. Think about how easy it would be for the tv studios to setup a tracker to which you would have to register and distribute torrents for video files with commercials inserted, appended, prepended, scrolled text whatever. I know that I would register and take the bit of extra time to download a few commercials if every episode of the shows I like were easily and freely acessible. If everyone has equal access there is no need for DRM. However, I would not enjoy donating my upload bandwidth to distrbute a commercial to others. Besides, if the commercials ever got too annoying, I'm sure that I could cut them out myself or get them from someone that had, but then again here the geek factor comes into play. Average Joe won't bother cutting out the commercials and that's what matters.

Now that I've been thinking on the subject, it occurs to me that there is no reason that the studios could not tailor the commercials to your registered profile. If I could say something like, "I'll watch commercials about stuff I've told you I like and only related to the show I'm watching now. Also I would like the commercials to be music only with text info in Spanish." If I were the studio I would stream the commercials individually and directly while depending on users to provide the appropriate content to other users. I'm sure someone else has thought of this stuff already. With bittorrent and a multimedia focused PC, the following is already a reality.

"Returning home after a vacation in 2004, Andy Volk dumped his luggage in the hallway and settled into an armchair for an evening of his favorite shows: The Simpsons, Futurama, and The Streets of San Francisco. But when he called up the Now Playing menu on his TiVo, he discovered a couple of things he'd never seen next to the usual items. A friend who'd been house-sitting had loaded the DVR with a whole new world of television. At the top of the list was Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, something Volk, a product manager at Yahoo!, had never considered watching. He pushed Play. And he loved it."

Wired 13.09: The Super Network
[Television TV media network web archive nerd video Wired piracy article]