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BitTorrent Legit Service Launches
The launch of the BitTorrent Entertainment Network came out today; there's the AP write-up, which is decent enough but the interview with Bram about it is more interesting. Tangentially, the the education of lawmakers on video DRM is an interesting countweight to all this.
I'd be interested to hear what people think of the new BitTorrent DNA 2.0, which apparently uses QOS to dial itself down in the presence of VOIP, etc. But it also apparently won't be open-sourced, and will be proprietary to the Mainline client.
And I'm not a big fan of all the snarky comments, myself.
A lot of linux distros distribute ISOs via bit torrent. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that's legal under the GPL. As for non-GPL stuff, what about legaltorrents.com? Legal uses of bit-torrent aren't new.
Somewhat crippling ToS from the site (you must download and watch movies/TV shows before 30 days, can only watch it for 24 hours after first playing); and the kicker: $3.99 for rentals. Imo at least the charge should be half that. There is no distibution cost other than keeping the tracker/site up, and you can only watch it for a day! If I watched even 3 movies a month, it'd cost less to just go through netflix, and I could keep them as long as I wanted.
However, it is still good to see BT somewhat more in the public eye. Maybe it'll catch on and more people will realize that they're being ripped off.
When I saw this announcement, I went to the site and saw they they had a few movies I wanted to see. Not such a bad selection, and even some free stuff! Hell I'd pay for it if its a reasonable price, I thought.
I clicked on a movie to see how much it would cost to download and watch. $3.99 to "Rent". Oh shit, I thought to myself. Rent. That means, DRM. I looked at the bottom of the page:
Well. Funny, I don't USE windows. Hm, guess I'm not part of their target demographic. Oh well, I'll just head over to isohunt then, or walk down to the movie store and get something older. I'm a little disappointed, but
I can see it now... $4 to rent a reduced-quality movie for 24 hours, with DRM. Geeks everywhere will demand the studio masters to be downloadable without DRM for a nickel a pop (and even that may be too costly for some).
You actually want American Idol?
Consider it a service for them not having it!
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
Realistically, how else do you propose to sell stuff over a P2P network?
This comes up every time there's a thread about the new "legit" BitTorrent service. I don't think it's possible. If this service attracts enough attention, the DRM is going to be bypassed. I doubt it's even going to be that hard, because the nature of P2P services makes end-to-end DRM impossible. So not only do you have the inherent flaws in the DRM system you choose, but you also have an inherent incompatibility between the DRM (which makes every user's file different) and P2P distribution, which depends on many users wanting files that are bit-for-bit identical with each other.
There's no good way to do both. They can layer on the encryption but it's nothing but turd polish; the data that's coming down the wire from the other clients has to be encrypted on a non-per-user basis (perhaps a per-file basis), and then the application of the per-user DRM needs to be done in the client. Which means the layer of encryption that presumably protected it in transit needs to be removed. So if you can play spot-the-key, and grab the per-file key as the client program decrypts it in preparation for applying the per-user DRM encryption, you can get a key that lets everyone decrypt the file.
In short, you cannot sell content via a service like this. Not going to happen in the long run, I think. What you probably could do, is sell access to the network, where the value is in the subscription to the content and not in the content itself per se. (Of course the movie studios would hate that, since they want to think of each movie "copy" sold as a revenue source.)
Looking forward, the future of services is to market the services and the access, rather than the content. Digitization and the resulting ease of copying makes it nearly impossible to sell pieces of information as distinct products, like aspirin tablets, in the same way that the content producers have grown used to. The game is up, it's just not going to work any more; they're fighting against inherent problems with DRM, inherent problems with P2P distribution, and inherent problems with the nonconservative nature of information.
However, what you can sell, is the access to a large repository or service which lets you access a lot of information in an organized and reliable manner. That represents a value to the customer, above and beyond just getting ahold of the movies/books/articles/whatever themselves. If a customer just wants to watch a single movie, say Pirates of the Caribbean, they can just go download a pirated copy. They are always going to be able to go and download a pirated copy. As long as the studios and "legit" alternatives mess around with DRM, it is always going to be easier for them to go download a pirated copy. However, what the studios could sell, would be instantaneous access to all the films ever made by Hollywood in the past century. Doing that -- putting together the database, organizing everything, providing a method of distribution, etc. -- is a value that's separate from the movies themselves, and the organization and logistics aren't readily copied. That wouldn't even require DRM; it wouldn't be practical for an end-user to copy more than a tiny fraction of the available material, so there's no risk. It's like a cable company and your VCR: the amount of content you can tape is never going to compete with the amount of content that's being pushed down to you all the time (I'd need to have 600+ VCRs running continuously in order to capture what Comcast pushes to me). Without DRM, you can use P2P to distribute without layers of useless encryption. To monetize it, you sell access to the network (the network is managed by a central server that tells clients where seeds and other clients are -- you don't pay, it doesn't tell you).
People don't want to buy content, they want to buy access to streams of content; they don't want to buy data, they want access to repositories of data that contain more stuff than t
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
For rented items, I'm willing to accept time- and device-restrictions. If I rent a DVD from NetFlix, I don't expect to play it on anything but a DVD player. I expect to pay no more than I would at a video store or DVD-rental-by-mail service for a similar product for a similar rental period.
The advantages of a well-done digital rental service are that when ordering, I can
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Finally there's a way of getting DRMed WMV files to me that costs the content distributor less! Thank God, now they can afford enough ammo to hunt the poor with.