For the first time ever, this year's Super Bowl was streamed live online, to the initial delight, and then disappointment, of fans, who experienced poor image quality and delays of several minutes.

The man behind the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, Bram Cohen, is developing software that could fix such problems. This protocol facilitates the distribution of large files by having users serve up fragments of a file to other users as they download it. This makes it possible to share very large files without a single central server.

Cohen's company, also known as BitTorrent, is now working on technology that could allow a person with far fewer resources than a TV studio to stream live footage to an audience of millions.