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Hollywood Looks to BitTorrent for Distribution
daria42 writes "Vinton Cerf, who wrote the original TCP/IP protocol and is currently chairman of ICANN, said this week he had recently discussed BitTorrent with at least two interested movie producers. 'I know personally for a fact that various members of the movie industry are really getting interested in how to use the Internet--even BitTorrent--as a distributed method for distributing content,' Cerf said. 'I've spoken with several movie producers in the last month.'"
The thing is, if any movie producers/directors decided to distribute their works over the internet, they might not be able(allowed) to go on big screen anymore.
So any promising producers might not take up the offers, and those less-promising ones might only attract a lower level of interested audience.
We have seen few success stories in online music distribution by bands, but the mainstream still hasn't moved yet.
Having said that, anything has to start somewhere.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
The MPAA has done 180s before when it comes to tech, look at their complete change of face on the VCR and video industry after the famed surpreme court case.
Is anyone concerned that MP/RIAA would want to know their "enemy" better in order to discover its weaknesses and close it down more effectively? I can picture the discussion with Mr Cerf, and the movie guy is nodding and taking notes furiously, saying, "yes, do go on".
It's the same reason some men read Cosmo magazine- it's like getting behind the lines and into the mind of the adversary.
This would be terrific for showing that bittorrent is worthwile for small and large business models in which legal content is served. In Canada, one major cable ISP, Shaw, uses traffic shaping to heavily throttle bittorrent since they see it as a tool for pirates, but more mainstream uses of bittorrent would put pressure on Shaw to ease up on the throttling.
Well, I don't know about you. I think BitTorrent is very cool and has it's uses, especially amongst those who don't have multiple redundant fiber connections. But when game companies (Blizzard for example) and movie companies start to distribute their wares by way of BitTorrent, that makes me wonder.
Now I myself don't pay by volume, but I do know some who do! Are we supposed to pay for their wares, and then we get to download, sometimes slowly because BitTorrent downgrades users that don't share because of closed ports/firewalls etc.
We pay them, but we have to distribute it for them?!
Big companies, who probably have big a** internet connections themselves, should make their wares available for direct download by standard HTTP and/or FTP...
Well, maybe that's just me.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
There is a big difference between closing bittorrent sites that act as trackers for pirated materials and using the bittorrent protocol for distributing MPAA's approved legal content. Just the same as Blizzard using bittorrent to seed patches for World of Warcraft while not condoning piracy of their software over bittorrent.
It would be beneficial if the MPAA, RIAA or others embraced using p2p such as bittorrent because it helps to legitimize p2p. This doesn't mean protection for pirates, but it does mean protection for the protocol (i.e. we won't see legislation forcing it to be killed at the ISP level).
Sometimes my arms bend back.
So let me get this straight, the movie companies get to piggyback off of their customer's bandwidth to take a chunk out of their expenses? I can see the sense of community when its free stuff being distributed, but for DRM'd files and when you know someone is getting a profit, I'd think the sense of community that is normally associated with BitTorrent will vanish.
There has to be incentive for a person to use their internet connection to help out a publisher. Whether it be credit, cash, or free services, there has to be something there to make people want to seed.
Yeah, but this one was totally predictable. Overloaded servers and bandwidth limitations have been THE obstacle to growth for internet media. BT and its ilk solve those problems nicely. But these would-be distributors going to have to convince the ISPs to give consumers synchronous bandwidth to really make this scheme work effectively.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I see no contradiction.
If Hollywood chooses to use BitTorrent to distribute films (legally) but fights to shut down illegal distribution (via BitTorrent) this is no different from it distributing films by video and shutting down video pirates.
BitTorrent is a technology, not a legal or moral imperative.
It would be beneficial if the MPAA, RIAA or others embraced using p2p such as bittorrent because it helps to legitimize p2p. This doesn't mean protection for pirates
Actually, it could. Part of the problem with BitTorrent is the fact that downloading necessitates uploading - so even if you have a legal right to obtain a copy of something, in order to do it, you have to upload to other users (who may or may not have the right to have it). By embracing BitTorrent as a protocol, they're removing one of the possible objections - namely, they can't claim that a person downloading something from BitTorrent illegally is committing copyright infringement thousands of times - just once.
(Of course, this presumes that they won't recognize this problem and build it into some license agreement crap thing, which they probably will. It also doesn't avoid the objection that just because I have a legal license to one copy of a copyrighted work, and a fair right to make one copy of that copy, doesn't give me the right to make a copy of a different copy.)
I have a problem with BitTorrent being used to distribute content that I'm paying for. While I agree that movies and television shows should be legally available for download, they people supplying the content should pay for bandwidth.
:)
If I use BitTorrent, I'm using my own bandwidth to help them redistribute/resell the exact same content that I just paid for.
Because of this, any content distributed over torrents should be discounted accordingly.
I believe that torrents work right now because their content is recieved for free. There is a sentiment of community. You can only get a file because other people seeded it. So in kind, people continue to seed the files to return to favor. That's what makes it work.
If I'm paying $10 for a movie, I wouldn't count on me spending anytime seeding it. I've paid for it. I don't owe the community anything.
If that makes any sense...