In terms of the MP3 search engine, MP3.com spends millions of U.S. dollars on fileservers, as well as bringing in a new network appliance every month, Reiser said.
BitTorrent's content delivery system, originally developed as an open-source product, uses a "peer-to-peer" downloading method that can piece together a file from several servers at once, as well as from the hard drive of every user who has previously downloaded the file, taking the bandwidth burden off any single source.