DivX -doing for video what MP3s have done for music?

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

>From Salon:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/03/15/divx_part1/index.html

Escaping the Napster trap DivX Networks aims to do for video what MP3s
have done for music. Can it please both hackers and the movie biz? First
of two parts.
                         By Damien Cave [03/15/01] 

DivX shrinks video to about a fifth of its original size, making it
possible to download a full-length movie from the Net to your hard drive
in less than an hour. DivX is to video what MP3s are to music. A year ago
it was almost entirely underground; today more than 12 million people have
downloaded the software. Web sites offering support, new applications or
chat rooms appear almost daily, while DivX-encoded content -- hard to find
and difficult to download nine months ago -- now appears all over the Net.
File-trading services like Gnutella and Hotline, for example, regularly
index more than 7,000 servers with DivX downloads. Pornography, the latest
"Simpsons" episode, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" -- just about
anything you can see on television or in the theaters you can now get
online and for free. "It's unbelievable what's out there," one trader
says. "I download a movie just about every day."

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