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Fuzzy Logic Hollywood takes legal BitTorrent on board | Hollywood takes legal BitTorrent on board |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Monday, 26 February 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 3 But today’s legal video download stores don’t have the range of content you can get online, which dwarfs legal content considerably, and you have to pay for every item you get, instead of being able to pay a flat fee to access it all, or at the least a very generous portion thereof, for example asking you to pay for access to the very latest content (like a TV show) if you want to download and watch it on a weekly basis.
The show would become as part of the ‘all-you-can-eat’ pool of content after the first series has been aired online, maybe even longer than that, say 6 months. If you want it before hand to watch when your friends are watching, with a new episode made available each week (as TV shows are done now, essentially), in the window when the content was freshest, you could charge US $1.99 per episode or something like that. Just as there are music rental stores today that give you the vast bulk of their music collections for US $10-$15 per month, TV show and movies are inevitably going to go the same way. Indeed, it’s the model we already use with cable and satellite TV. You pay a set fee to watch a certain number of channels, and for that set fee you can watch as much as you want. Why does anyone think it will end up being any different over the Internet, while still letting people buy the latest TV shows on an episode by episode basis as new eps are ‘aired’ online so that people are rewarded for going to all the trouble of creating new shows. After it goes back into the ‘pool’, royalties are paid on performance. Shows that are viewed more than others receive more of the money earned each month by subscribers who pay a flat fee per month, the same kind of monthly fee you pay for cable TV now, most likely. Still, all of that is yet to come, and the latest announcement from BitTorrent is but the latest step in a long journey towards a digital media nirvana where any content you want is but a few clicks away of a remote to any screen – be it a TV, a video iPod, your mobile phone, a desktop or laptop computer or anything with a screen and an Internet connection. So what content does the new BitTorrent store carry? TV shows and over 3000 movies are available from partners including Fox, Lionsgate, Paramount, MGM, and MTV Networks, with over 1000 music videos too. Independent distributors such as First Look, Palm Pictures and Japanese company Kadokawa is available too, and when it comes to games, a partner called TryMedia distributes games online with titles from Activision, Ubisoft and Vivendi Games. As there are already 34 content providers, with more studios and partners to come, BitTorrent had to launch as they couldn’t wait to launch any longer. Their competitors already have stores up and running, but at the last minute there was a final one week delay to get MGM on board. Movies are available to rent at US $3.99 each with older titles at $2.99, download-to-own TV shows and music videos cost $1.99 and user-generated content is free and will all be applied with BitTorrent’s DRM to prevent the content being copied or shared with others. A music download service – which will happily and surprisingly be available without DRM, will also soon be added, and another bonus – free downloads of ad-supported TV shows are coming too. There's more about the new BitTorrent store that you need to know - please click onto page 3 for the conclusion!
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