Future Development

Potential future directions:

- Most likely: A simple and useful single-file format (gzip + tar) plus structured releases with a focus on excellent metadata + web index.html for browser viewing.

- Usenet: Functionality for simultaneously creating usenet and bittorrent releases. Should allow for torrent to be losslessly translated into a NZB, and vice-versa. The ideal flow is: Publisher creates a release with a normal torrent, and also uploads 512KiB blocks of the torrent to usenet. The blocks should be encrypted with a private key distributed with the torrent. Upon receiving the torrent, the whole torrent or missing blocks can be mechanically retrieved from usenet.

- Releases: Functionality for naming and formatting releases. One particularly promising avenue is creating a standard for release names that are both machine readable and human readable. Current release names (like Foo.Bar.S01E17.FMT-GRP) are close to being machine readable, but many different standards exist, so parsing them is awkward and complex. If standardizing those names is politically untenable, then maybe standardizing and adding a machine-readable blob, perhaps bech32 tlv, would be more feasible. Beyond that, an actual schema for the contents of torrents would make building rich services (search, auto-download, library manager, streaming, etc) much easier. For the first type of release, I'm considering albums or research papers.

- S3: Publish a release to an S3 bucket.

- Web: Generate HTML index files so a release can be published to the web.

- Plex/Sonarr/Radarr: Think about how intermodal-generated torrents can be compatible these apps. (Most likely by making sure the metadata is in the right place.)