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

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...

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?

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: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.

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!

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.

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.