Hollywood takes legal BitTorrent on board

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 26 February 2007 13:39

Opinion and Analysis

The BitTorrent store will not host any pirated content, but the software itself is said to be offer a button letting consumers click through to search content offered by ‘other’ bittorrent p2p networks, with this distinction apparently enough to keep the studios happy.

Movies were to be included for sale, by BitTorrent are saying that the studios want to charge too much – with prices like US $25 too much for consumers to swallow. The much lower price points of movie rentals which can remain on your computer for 30 days, or 24 hours after your first viewing, are much more agreeable and digestible for consumers right now.

Movies can still take a couple of hours to download, with TV shows naturally much faster – it really depends on the speed of your broadband connection and how popular the file is on the network, which will always be available to download thanks to servers that BitTorrent will run to always ensure availability.

The bittorrent protocol uses peer to peer (p2p) technology to download bits of the file from computers connected on the same p2p network. If a file or show is more popular, more people will have it, allow distribution to be made faster from all those individual computers.

It spreads the load across the Internet, rather than forcing all downloads to come from a single source, meaning that when demand is heavy, the network will actually perform better – the opposite of what happened to Apple’s iTunes store last Christmas (2006), which was slow or inaccessible following the extreme worldwide popularity of giving an iPod as a gift.

The new flood of online video download stores, and the massive volume of piracy point to one thing needed in abundance for the ability for everyone to use these services, whether legally or illegally. And that’s broadband. While some countries have an overabundance of broadband at superfast speeds, plenty of other countries are broadband backwaters, with slow broadband speeds coupled with low download caps.

Faster speeds and much more generous download caps or even true unlimited services are expensive. Low download limits with expensive per megabyte charges for going over the limit are stifling these kinds of services.

But thankfully, a revolution in wired and wireless broadband is also underway, with ADSL 2+ and cable broadband services increasingly available around the world. Some countries even have fibre-to-the-home, and are swimming in all the broadband they could desire.

The entry of a legal BitTorrent option has been a long time in coming, and could even be considered to be late to the party. But here it is as last, along with the Joosts and Babelgums of the world, firmly showing us all that the future of TV is the on demand download.

It’s a future that telco’s, ISPs, free-to-air TV stations, cable/satellite/pay TV and the latest round of IPTV services from BitTorrent, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Amazon, Wal-mart and plenty of others want to control. As I’ve said a few times before – sit down and get comfy, it’s going to be quite a show!