Startup Idea: A butler for your idle computer

So the premise is "what to do with an idle CPU", and the answer is to tap an entirely different resource, bandwidth, not knowing exactly how under/over-utilized it is at the moment?

Movies and music stream very well already, unless you have full TV seasons that you want to give away, I don't think you'll get much traction there.

The one place that this could work well is games. If Steam had a setting that would automatically download and install demos for the hottest new games, I bet a lot of people would try them out. I haven't used it in the last few months, but I remember seeing demos available for that I would be happy to play if I could do it right then instead of having to download, install, and (half an hour later) finally play.

It seems to me that the people likely to want to see this quantity of stuff are probably the people who already know how to use the download queue in their bittorrent clients.

I suspect the less computer literate, who are likely to get this bundled with something, will unknowingly let it run in the background until their network is unacceptably slow or their hard drive is unacceptably full, when they will have someone more knowledgeable "fix the internet", and this will just be one more program that gets taken out with the rest of the trash.

Anybody remember Bonzi Buddy? Haha.

This idea only made sense when people had limited bandwidth and downloads took forever.

If you start to push TV shows you're going to have to monitor if the connection is idle too (not just for the current computer but also for the entire house).

A better title would have been: "Bring back PointCast!"