I believe that this is a good step for the evolution of the Internet. Our over-reliance on TCP is not healthy for long-term development of the network. Particularly in media applications, such as streaming, high-definition audio/video, the possibility of moving most of the data validation from the packet level to the chunk level via post-processing of traffic on local machines shows a lot of promise.

I can imagine this software technology being adapted to provide streaming HD A/V on a short delay to allow for buffering and hash verification of data chunks.

By the way, I think that the reaction to this news by some people is completely overblown. While it is true that UDP traffic is not as well routed as TCP traffic, that much we can fix, and in the long term, transferring large quantities of *known* data will be far more efficient over UDP. With UDP, you don't have the overhead of ACK packets constantly going back to the server! Like I said, very promising stuff. It might take the infrastructure a little while to catch up with the increase in UDP traffic, but once it does, it will be a good thing moving forward.