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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""
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.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Yes, we do.
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...
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?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Will they have "Happy Days?" Because I'd love to buy that episode where Fonzie jumps over a shark on waterskis from Bittorrent.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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!!
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".
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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!
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, $30 for a book (a higher cost than the dead tree version), and then get told when, where, and how many times they can and can't read the book they would own if they bought the dead tree version, but only have a very limited license to with the ebook version.
Because BitTorrent has also partnered with CacheLogic which provides Internet Caching solutions. You pay your subscriptions to legally access the content and you can now use BitTorrent not only to download from your peers but from strategically placed caches.
...
This substantially reduces the cost on a content provider that would otherwise need to provision expensive hardware and bandwidth to deliver content via FTP/HTTP. Now they can use the resources of the downloaders and use CacheLogic's infrastructure to provide service even better than the one current BitTorrent networks have and perhaps even better than they could possibly afford to provide by using FTP-like central servers.
Users are motivated to pay BitTorrent and content providers, and not download for free, simply because BitTorrent combined with in-network caching gives a better service than plain BitTorrent. Users that don't pay cannot access Cachelogic's infrastructure. If their pricing is reasonable, I can see this scheme taking off rapidly. I know i would pay 5-10$ 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."
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.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!