Reed-Solomon coding is an old fella. Whenever you have a link which is unreliable and you can't afford to retransmit packets on the link when errors are introduced, RS is your friend. Mobile phones are among the prime users of this.

If I remember correctly, the PAR/PAR2 formats used on usenet is using RS-encoding as well.

An alternative would be to plot the file in N-dimensional space and define a set of vectors to pinpoint it. When you have enough vectors you have the precise pinpoint. Additional vectors gives the error-correction capability. Some microsoft guys played with this idea for Bittorrent-like networks a while back. But there is a disadvantage in the time it takes to decode the data, and it probably doesn't help the swarm that much :/

Another interesting viewpoint: We might need RS-encoding on the local harddisks soon (implemented in hardware or software), as it would circument the bit-error rate problem with those disks.