The technology best known for pirating movies, music and software online is increasingly being adopted by businesses as a cheap way to get video content to customers.

A number of startups are embracing so-called peer-to-peer technology and have convinced some big-name media companies to use them to deliver legal content.

“In 2005 when we met with content owners, ‘peer-to-peer’ was a dirty word,” said Robert Levitan, chief executive of file-sharing company Pando Networks Inc. “In 2007, finally, content owners came and said ‘Yeah, we think there’s a role for P2P.’”

Levitan was speaking Friday at the first “P2P Market Conference” of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, a trade group with more than 100 members.

Pando is prime example of mainstream acceptance: It’s providing the means for NBC to provide DVD-quality downloads of its shows, including “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno.

But 90 percent of P2P downloads are still of illegally copied content, according to David Hahn, vice president of product management at SafeNet Inc., which tracks the networks.

Hahn said 12 million to 15 million people are file-sharing across the world at any one time, mainly on the BitTorrent and eDonkey networks. The attraction of file-sharing is not just that it’s free — there’s also content available that can’t be had by legal means, like TV shows that haven’t aired in Europe.

The BitTorrent software was invented and set free on the Net in 2002 by Bram Cohen. He later started a company to profit from the technology. In 2005, BitTorrent Inc. stopped providing links to copyright content in 2005 and now helps studios distribute movies.

Overall, acceptance of P2P technology is higher in Western Europe, where piracy using the technology also happens to be especially rampant, according to SafeNet.

The British Broadcasting Corp. uses P2P technology from Verisign Inc. for its iPlayer, which streams some of its…