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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.