Zoom In on VeriSign

That's right -- VeriSign. Not Apple or Amazon, but security software company VeriSign, which last March paid $62 million for a P2P start-up called Kontiki that was backed by Benchmark Capital, ex-Netscape founders and Adobe. The announcement said only that Adobe and VeriSign would reveal the fruits of their collaboration later this year.

But consider: Suppose the next update of Flash, which is installed on 700 million devices, included Kontiki's P2P software. Then, just possibly, those 700 million PCs and mobile devices could at a click download movies and TV shows with YouTube-like ease but with DVD-quality images.

I say "just possibly" because VeriSign has to deal with the other barriers -- security, bandwidth hogging and studio licensing. But think about what it means if they pull it off: For $62 million, VeriSign bought itself a high-resolution YouTube (which was sold to Google for 26 times as much.)

Robert Scoble, tech evangelist and former Microsoftie, raved on his blog about Kontiki's clarity and speed. "It really rocks," he wrote in a post he titled "Netflix is Dead."

"The quality wasn't distinguishable from the HD-DVD's I get from Netflix," he wrote. "Why would any of us go into a Blockbuster in the future, or wait two days for a DVD to show up from Netflix?"