Warner Bros. to Try File Sharing in Germany

Carl Bialik writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Warner Bros. plans to sell TV shows and movies online in Germany via P2P. In2Movies, to launch in March, 'will feature movies dubbed into German, including "Batman Begins" and "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," for a fee that Warner says will be similar to the cost of a DVD. It will also offer television shows like "The O.C." and locally made programs and movies. Users, who will have to register for the service, will be able to keep the movie indefinitely. But instead of getting a movie from a central server, pieces of it could come from other people on the network who also bought that movie.' The president of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group says, 'Studios can't just turn their backs and hope "P2P" is going to go away tomorrow.'"

Comments

Country dependent

[Tethys_was_taken]

This may work in EU countries where most broadband users have uncapped links, but in countries like Australia (or India, but there are bigger problems in that case), where most connections have usage caps, this is not going to work. People are going to refuse to pay for the content and then pay for the data transfer.

That said, it's a nice change to see some positive developments as far as the ??AA and the internet go, and a very welcome change from banning all innovation, as they tried recently...

Re:Especially considering the slow uploads...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Any reasonable P2P protocol splits the file up into packets and sends out requests for packet numbers- you aren't going to be pulling from just one source, so upload bandwidth really doesn't matter as much.