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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.'"
Notice that the first link under that article in the 'related links'
section is, "BitTorrent hubs close after ISP raid". In that article is
says, "The music industry's anti-piracy unit claims 50 file-sharing
[BitTorrent] hubs in Australia closed....". Seems like the
entertainment industry's one hand doesn't know what the other is
doing. That is the biggest problem as I see it; trying to get all the
content holders, content producers, content creators and talent all on
one page. Until they do that none of them, nor us, will be able to
benefit from what the Internet has to offer as a new channel for media
distribution.
Will it be easy? No. Will it happen at all? Eventually. In the mean
time it is going to be very painful indeed. Two steps forward, one
back.
--greg Vulcan quiescent... Q: What machine shutdown with this message?
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.
We released a video we made for Portland band The Decemberists to bittorrent on purpose. We've had much greater impact from that than the few times MTV2 aired it.
Wired article details how and why.
For everyone concerned some four weeks later it's been an enormous success.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
If it costs less than the $10 i have to pay for a movie ticket, plus the $5 for a soda and $4 for a small popcorn, then I think it's a definate plus.
Went to see sin city last night. $20 for two tickets, $4.50 for a soda, and $4 for a popcorn. Not exactly a cheap date anymore.
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.
Ironic, how the industry turns to one of the tools their were claiming ruins it.
It's a smart move by the movie business, they are expanding into the online market, better late than never. They just need a way to make sure to stop piracy, as shown with the iTunes mp3 encoding.
Business Voyeur
I should've mentioned - the band are not on a major label.
The album and video came out in the same week. A week later the band found themselves without the support of a major label in the Billboard Top 200 and in the top 10 at iTMS and top 20 at amazon.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
Just stop suing the sites and bam, they will distribute it for you! It's amazing.
The net in general has been around for quite some time; much of which the music and film industries has met it with open hostility. In particular P2P applications thus far has met with nothing but legal hostility. That said, I am suspicious this is but a ploy to lure out some of the application authors to be crucified at a later date.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
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.
I'm ready to pay a dime/episode of The Daily Show. With commercials. I'll pay a quarter/episode without commercials. Sell me a torrent in a timely fashion.
I can get it illegally now, but I'd much rather pay for it and be able to get it timely, consistently, and in better quality than some of the rips seem to appear.
The amateur are producing short films already using broadband to distribute their films.
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.
The thing most people dont realise which is a contributing factor to this success is that a music video is basically an advertisement for a band. By distributing your ad to people who are intelligent enough to comprehend BT, and not the near-illiterate common denominator of MTV, you might actually succeed in reaching people who are not only jaded enough to know when something is bad, but jaded enough to realise that something is good.
(Disclaimer: Note that if you disagree with anything I just said, you're probably right. I'm really not one to argue. I'm more one to ramble.)
Oh, that and MTV just plain sucks. Those of us interested in something new/original frequently avoid MTV stuff, because most of it lacks originality. Hell, everything I hear on the radio is just a rehash of everything I heard a year ago on the same station. Different name, same sound.
SRSLY.
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 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 think he mis-heard those movie producers. What they said was that BitTorrent is a "disturbing method for distributing content."
As inevitable as IP-based film distribution is, Vint Cerf talking with TWO movie producers isn't news and doesn't herald the dawn of a new age.
If Slashdot worked like Fark, we'd file this under... OBVIOUS.
Can't say I have any more faith in the MPAA waking up and smelling the coffee than I do the RIAA. If you've actually worked with the powerhouses in the industry you'll know that they value control far more than they do money, and despise everything internet-related precisely because it strips them of some of that control. This is an industry where execs regularly torpedo projects with huge promise and/or ratings just because someone working on the project has pissed them off. Money has very little to do with it so long as a certain minimal amount keeps rolling in (and sometimes not even then).
Don't look at this through rose-colored glasses. Execs in the movie and TV industries are some of the biggest egomaniacs alive. If anyone is looking to distribute movies/TV via BitTorrent it'll be some small house outside the mainstream that can't get their films into theaters. The big guys will never follow suit; they'll take the RIAA path and try to legislate/intimidate p2p into oblivion.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I hate to be critical, but movie producers are not movie distributors. In fact a movie producer can be anything from agent, script right holder, banker, to part of a star's entourage. Cerf talking to movie producers is like me talking to cows to judge what Mcdonalds is doing
The movie studios (the distributors) are well aware of bittorrent and the myriad of other distribution technologies that are available. The distributors do not generally distribute directly to consumers, but use middlemen (which include hotel VOD systems, cable, TV broadcasters, airlines, retail stores, rental services, etc). If someone implements a system using bittorrent which meets the security requirements they have, they would license content to it. Bittorrent would just be a component of the system.
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...
I'm a beta tester for the MPAA's 21st century digital distribution system.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."