BitTorrent Partners with TV and Movie Companies

An anonymous reader writes "BitTorrent Inc just announced that they teamed up with several TV and Movie companies. The new list of partners includes 20th Century Fox, Paramount PicturesG4, Kadokawa Pictures USA, Lionsgate, MTV Networks (Comedy Central, MTV and more), Palm Pictures and Starz Media. These deals will add a great deal of content to the BitTorrent video store, including popular movies like Mission: Impossible III and X-Men The Last Stand and popular TV-show such as "Prison Break" and "South Park""

Comments

Does anyone have details on this one?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the videos are in Linux friendly and non-DRM'd-to-hell format I will be a customer. Can anyone find some solid facts on the details?

Re:Does anyone have details on this one?

[SilentChris]

"If the videos are in Linux friendly and non-DRM'd-to-hell format I will be a customer."

Then I guess you won't be a customer, then. ;)

The entertainment studios have already laid down the rules. "We're cool with this as long as the consumer is limited as possible". On the Xbox 360, you can buy TV shows -- for only that Xbox. You can rent HD movies -- for only a couple of days. Even the iTunes store is getting slowly backed into a wall (the restrictions on movies and television shows are a lot more onerous than music). The only thing that Bittorrent changes is the distribution method.

Personally, I don't really care if the files are DRM'd or not. What I listen to on my iPod is different than what I watch on my television versus what I watch on my computer. I bought a copy of The Incredibles on iTunes because I only plan to watch it on my laptop. I bought an episode of Venture Bros for the Xbox 360 the other day, even though it's offered on the iTunes store. People seem to think we're going to buy multiple copies of the same show -- not on my watch.

And I mean, hell, it's $2 for a TV show. I spend more on that for my morning coffee. As long as it stays advertisement-free (entertainment industry, you listening?) I have no problem plopping down a few bucks. Other people will fight to download it off Pirate Bay I supposed (personally, it's always taken far less time for me to download from one of these services than Pirate Bay; my time is worth more than $2).

So lets get this straight

[tttonyyy]

The MPAA are working with BitTorrent Inc (a US company) to move their content away from illegal copies to a commercial business case.

The RIAA are working against AllofMP3 (a RU company) to move their business away from legally selling material to a non-existant case.

Something's a bit twisted about that.

Re:So lets get this straight

[Threni]

> The MPAA are working with BitTorrent Inc (a US company) to move their content away from illegal copies to a commercial business
> case.

They'll profit from selling movies.

> The RIAA are working against AllofMP3 (a RU company) to move their business away from legally selling material to a non-existant
> case.

They're not profiting from someone else selling their IP.

Re:So lets get this straight

[IAmTheDave]

They'll profit from selling movies.

They'll also save money by distributing said movies using your bandwidth, instead of theirs. They're capitalizing on the idea that "torrents are cool" and hope that by simply inserting the words "download using bittorrent" that the geek side of you will be more willing to buy.

It's a shame that in some bid to legitimize itself to the media companies, BitTorrent has quite literally been used like a cheap whore. MPAA gets to save money on bandwidth and distribution costs, and your computer gets to run what I can only imagine will be a constantly-running, branded bittorrent client in the background, using up your bandwidth to save the MPAA money.

BT sold out, or were really stupid - one or the other.

Re:I'm lost

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Yes, we do.

So what's new?

[Anonymous Coward]

including popular movies like Mission: Impossible III and X-Men The Last Stand and popular TV-show such as "Prison Break" and "South Park""

But I already get those from Bittorrent...

Re:So what's new?

[aadvancedGIR]

Of course, but here, you could legally get them 6 monthes later with 20yo VCR quality, FBI warning and ad breaks for only 29$99. And you could read it exactly once, but you can keep the anti-copy package forever if you want.

Does anyone...

[Anonymous Coward]

...have a bittorrent link to bittorrent.com, the site seems to be slashdotted.

Not details, but strong suspicions.

[Kadin2048]

I know absolutely next to nothing about its technical details, but since the service is MPAA sanctioned, I can guarantee that it will not be DRM-free. There's no possible way.

I've been thinking though about how you could do DRM on bittorrent-delivered files, and it seems like a problem. Bittorrent only works because you have many people distributing the same file; if each client's copy is encrypted with a personal key (which is the only way to keep people from redistributing them) then P2P won't work.

I suspect that they try to dodge this problem by using a client program that's really, really ugly -- lots of obfuscation, use of keys stored on remote servers, encryption of everything that's written to disk, etc. I assume that all peer nodes are authenticated against a central database as well, and that their communication is encrypted or at least obfuscated (and naturally, the whole thing will be a 'Trade Secret').

There's really not going to be anything good about this service, except as a technical challenge to hackers. Maybe there are some recently-unemployed programmers in Russia who'd like to give it a go?

Re:Not details, but strong suspicions.

[Zantetsuken]

But what the gp said, is basically that since the technical side of BitTorrent (and other P2P) works by everybody having the same data to distribute. Now take into account that you can't lock/unlock something without storing the key in the file (how do you know they used the right password if you don't even have the right one?). This means that the binary and/or meta-data in the file would be different for each and every purchase, and so since everybody has different data, it can't be redistributed.

The only other way (that I can see) to circumvent this by including the key in the purchased movie file(s) would be to put a few thousand keys in - but then you've opened up the inevitability of people extracting the license keys - making this type of system including a few thousand keys useful for only a short period of time, after which it works against what they want it to do.

The closest solution I can see that would work would be to bloat the crap outta the Mainline BitTorrent client (and any other that wants to be legally compatible with this) and add video encoding/re-encoding capabilities - download the movie after purchasing your license, then wait an hour or 2 for the computer to re-encode the movie with the DRM and key that you purchased. The problem I see with this is people stopping the movie from being re-encoded and DRM'ed, and then having a movie from a legal service (except for breaching the terms of EULA by stopping DRM'ing) without any DRM on it - and oh yeah, I don't see people wanting to waste an hour or more waiting for their computer to put limitations on something...

Re:Not details, but strong suspicions.

[NSIM]

The need to distribute the same file via BitTorrent doesn't seem like a big problem. Distribute the movie as encrypted in some way and once you've got it you have to get your unique and probably hardware specific decrypt key before you can play it. Decryption of the movie is done on the fly, so the unencrytped version is never stored on disk, doesn't seem like a big technology problem.

Re:Not details, but strong suspicions.

[doodlebumm]

The DRM will be such that you have to use their player, or a player that is compliant with their DRM. It will then not play until you pay - that video for that player on that machine.

Yes, someone could crack it - theoretically. So what.

Don't buy DRM anything!!! It is just heroin and crack for the entertainment industry. If they think they can get away with it because people are buying it, they they will continue to do it. If they get no revenue from it, they will discontinue it. That doesn't mean that they won't try to get your money some other way, but if they see that people don't want DRM crap, and it's not profitable, they will stop it. We need to make them give us what we want, not what they want to give to us.

DRM is bad. Just say no!

Aaaaaay!

[Rob T Firefly]

Will they have "Happy Days?" Because I'd love to buy that episode where Fonzie jumps over a shark on waterskis from Bittorrent.

Re:seed? no thanks

[udderly]

While this is an AC post, it does make a good point. Why should I both pay to view content and, in addition, pay for the bandwidth and storage for its delivery system? Seems kind of ridiculous.

Step 1. Get TV and Movie companies to provide content
Step 2. Get end-users to provide storage and bandwidth
Step 3. Profit!!

My Only Question

[RAMMS EIN]

I have only one question:

Will I be able to play the files?

I'm deliberately not saying what platform I'm on or which media player I'm using, because, if I need a specific media player or platform, the answer to the question is "no".

BOGO

[PingSpike]

You mean I can pay for the movie I'm downloading AND provide the seller with the bandwidth to do it? What a fantastic opportunity for consumers to share the crippling costs that hollywood is enduring!

And it's still...

[clickety6]

... more convenient (= quicker and cheaper) for me to go to the local video store and buy or rent the DVD.

So where's the incentive for me for downloading it via bitorrent and letting MPAA profit from using my bandwidth ?

Hard (engineering) problem.

[Kadin2048]

This is because nobody has yet found a way to make an inexpensive handheld display that has anything approaching the resolution, reflectivity, and contrast ratio of ink on paper; not to mention the battery life.

To simulate a paper book you'd need something that had a contrast ratio of about 80:1, an ISO brightness (reflectivity at 457nm held at 45deg incident) of 80-90, and a resolution of somewhere around 300 dpi, which means a 2400x3000 pixel display for 8"x10".

I think it might just be that making an ebook reader that can compete with a technology that we've perfected over the last 1,000-plus years, is harder than putting a person on the moon or making an artificial eye.

Right idea, wrong protocol

[spyrochaete]

If I'm buying a movie why do I also have to buy bandwidth to distribute it to other purchasers? These movies had best be very cheap or the ordeal won't be worth all the trouble. I very much resented Blizzard for forcing its paying customers to VERY SLOWLY distribute patches over a totally non-configurable proprietary BT client while other games provide max downrate HTTP/FTP distribution.

Re:Right idea, wrong protocol

[slashdotmsiriv]

Because BitTorrent has also partnered with CacheLogic which provides Internet Caching solutions. You pay your subscriptions to legally access the content and you can now use BitTorrent not only to download from your peers but from strategically placed caches.

This substantially reduces the cost on a content provider that would otherwise need to provision expensive hardware and bandwidth to deliver content via FTP/HTTP. Now they can use the resources of the downloaders and use CacheLogic's infrastructure to provide service even better than the one current BitTorrent networks have and perhaps even better than they could possibly afford to provide by using FTP-like central servers.

Users are motivated to pay BitTorrent and content providers, and not download for free, simply because BitTorrent combined with in-network caching gives a better service than plain BitTorrent. Users that don't pay cannot access Cachelogic's infrastructure. If their pricing is reasonable, I can see this scheme taking off rapidly. I know i would pay 5-10$ to download a movie i want to see now in a couple of hours or less, instead of waiting 2-3 days, while using all my uplink and slowing down my browsing speeds. From the article: "In a joint announcement made today by CacheLogic and BitTorrent, a global network of cache servers has been organized under the name "VelociX". VelociX is the network protocol that governs the actions of a theoretical global community of cache servers. With potentially thousands of networked cache servers at the disposal of the end user, network costs are cut and download speeds are increased significantly.

For example, let's take a look at a CDP enabled client on the prowl for a specific 4.5 gig file. The CDP looks for the closest geographical area for a VelociX swarm, in addition to conventional peers. The VelociX swarm provides the bulk of the file sought after, greatly reducing the reliance on peers. This equates to greatly accelerated download speeds, and since this takes place largely on dedicated servers and not peers, the ISPs costs are reduced. ...

Unless you plan on downloading authorized content, the network probably isn't for you. In the CacheLogic press release, VelociX will allow "legal content (infringing content is not accelerated) to be inexpensively delivered in minutes instead of hours." Content that is authorized to function on the VelociX network must be manually published via specific hash codes to a central data base."

Re:Oh boy!

[Pojut]

I don't think of reading an eBook like a normal book (i.e. on paper or something like paper) It is, after all, an ELECTRONIC BOOK.

When I think of an eBook reader being perfected, this is what I envision.

Something the size of those old apple PDA's...roughly about the size of a small paperback. 512mb of internal flash memory with a CF card port. Adjustable brightness and contrast on the screen, adjustable font size, standard times new roman font, the ability to read the major ebook formats.

Why is that so difficult?

Re:Oh boy!

[stile99]

The reason ebooks have not caught on, and never will, is that nobody wants them.

Oh wait, that's not it. Turns out tons of people want them. What nobody wants is to pay $350 for the reader, $30 for a book (a higher cost than the dead tree version), and then get told when, where, and how many times they can and can't read the book they would own if they bought the dead tree version, but only have a very limited license to with the ebook version.

You're overthinking it.

[shaneh0]

They distribute an encrypted version of the file. This file is what's transferred and seeded, etc.

Upon downloading the file, you use a program to unlock it. The program would interact with a web-service. It would charge your credit card, give you a username/password, and it would decrypt the file and merge in your unique signature. You'd never see the key that's used to decrypt the file. It's never stored on your PC and it's encrypted itself with SSL during the key-retrieval.

I'm not suggesting this is how it would work, but I *am* a software developer and this would be how I would probably approach the problem. Loading a file with "thousands of keys" doesn't really jive with how encryption actually works. An encrypted file doesn't store ANY keys, let alone thousands of them.

Read what you just said.

[Ayanami Rei]

The client app decrypts the file...

And THAT'S where you strike. The only catch is that not only do you have a free-and-clear copy, but so does anybody else (the key is easier to distribute than the now-un-DRM movie itself). In a non P2P model, the content provider can limit the spread of a key that breaks an official file by using seperate per-file encrpytion keys for each registered user.

No amount of mucking about with SSL or PKI will fix that problem.

I can't be the only person who's thought this

[Adriax]

Why not just cut a chunk of the video file out, critical data that will make the file unplayable without, and a nontrivial amount so it can't be reconstructed.
Take that data, encrypt it with the victim's assigned key, and distribute the video in 2 parts. The encrypted part is personally downloaded, while the bulk data is torrented. Then you just have a special plugin for windows media player or something else that reads both file streams and reconstructs on the fly, never recreating the real file.
20megs out of a 600meg movie would be trivial for them to serve to people and they'd still get the benefit of 600megs torrented.