An obscure blogger films his three-year-old daughter reciting the plot of the first Star Wars movie. He stitches together the best parts--including the sage advice "Don't talk back to Darth Vader; he'll getcha"--and posts them on the video-sharing website YouTube. Seven million people download the file. A baby-faced University of Minnesota graduate student with an improbably deep voice films himself singing a mind-numbingly repetitive social-protest song called "Chocolate Rain": 23 million downloads. A self-described "inspirational comedian" films the six-minute dance routine that closes his presentations, which summarizes the history of popular dance from Elvis to Eminem: 87 million downloads.

Video downloads are sucking up bandwidth at an unprecedented rate. A short magazine article might take six minutes to read online. Watching "The Evolution of Dance" also takes six minutes--but it requires you to download 100 times as much data. "The Evolution of Dance" alone has sent the equivalent of 250,000 DVDs' worth of data across the Internet.