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BitTorrent Becomes Ever More Legit
lily_bt writes "BitTorrent just signed a deal with 4 entertainment distributors to add more than 1,600 titles to its video library. From 'SuperSize Me' to The Three Stooges to Bollywood films, BitTorrent wants to offer the most comprehensive service when it launches its pay service. The best part is that this content will be made available by subscription." From the article: "Once distrustful of peer-to-peer technologies, Hollywood studios appear more willing to partner with companies such as BitTorrent and video-sharing site Guba.com, which last month partnered with Warner Bros. to distribute movie titles. BitTorrent, widely used to both legally and illegally swap copies of copyright movies, has been aiming to turn its technology into a tool used for legal services."
Now all we need is to get the ISPs to stop blocking Bittorrent. That's the only thing I run that actually makes it worth getting high speed, and to get it to work, I not only have to change the port it runs on, I have to change it to a specific port that for some reason they don't check. I think that Bittorrent's biggest adversary will be ISPs who insist on blocking it, or make it a pain to configure in order to cut down on the users' "unlimited" bandwidth.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Just checked out guba.com. In Firefox, they tell me that i have to be running IE, and have windows media 9 or higher, "Which support the Windows Media Digital Rights Management System as required by our premium content providers. We will add other DRM support as soon as it becomes available and approved by major premium content providers" CrapTastic!
After reading everyone's comments I've come to the opinion that they're going to hit a big roadblock with this. The people most interested in this type of distribution model are the exact same people least interested in putting up with restrictive digital rights management, especially of the Microsoft variety.
:(. I, for example, would love to lay the DVD (and all physical distribution formats) to rest in favor of files downloaded over the internet (hint: I already have). It's cooler, it SHOULD be cheaper, files don't get scratched every time I touch them, and I plan to have a computer screen bigger than my TV screen anyway. But there's simply _NO_ way I'm going to pay money for something that requires a Microsoft product to work. I'd rather climb up a skyscraper, wrap one end of a chain of Windows 98 CDs around my neck, tie the other end to a lightning rod, and jump off. I'm also not going to put up with a proprietary DRM of any kind.
It's almost like these companies don't do any market research at all
If someone can develop and popularize an open source standard DRM format that has REASONABLE (or at least adjustable - so that I can choose to buy things with less restrictions) restrictions call me.
Haiku for you!
I think bittorent's deals can eventually help Net Neutrality. If big content providers are successful using bittorent to distribute their properties then they will start to cry foul when bittorent traffic is relegated to the slow speed tier. The content providers such as Warner have properties that the ISPs want (TV shows/on demand movies etc...) and thus they can push the ISPs to keep bittorent traffic untouched.
The more the big content providers find ways of distributing content directly to the consumer the more interested they will become in telling ISPs to stay out of the gatekeeper business.