BiTorrent video store launches Monday

by Brad Linder Feb 25th 2007

After helping thousands of internet users to download illegal copies of music, movies, and software over the last few years, BitTorrent is going legit. The BitTorent Entertainment Network launches Monday, with official support from content producers including Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, MTV, Paramount, MGM, and Lions Gate.

The store will feature about 3,000 movies at launch, and several thousand television episodes. There'll also be about 1,000 video games, and 1,000 music videos.

TV shows will sell for $1.99 per episode, which seems to be the going rate. You'll be able to rent movies, but not buy them, with new releases, including Superman Returns renting for $3.99, and older titles costing $2.99. Apparently BitTorrent has permission to sell feature length films, but decided against it after seeing how much the studios wanted to charge users for those films.

The videos will play in Windows Media Player 11 and include Microsoft DRM. That poses a few problems for the new service. First, it means that videos will only be available on Windows computers. Second, while companies like Amazon or Apple are well known companies that have begun offering consumers a chance to download videos in the last few years, BitTorrent is only really a big name among those who are used to using the technology to download videos for free.

If you have a choice of using the BitTorrent Entertainment Network to download a video that you can only watch on one Windows-based PC for a limited time, and you have to pay $3.99 for it, or turning to an alternative torrent network that will allow you to download the same video for free and without any DRM, which would you choose? Because I don't think it's fair to say that BitTorrent is in the same league as Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple at this point. I think the company's main competition will be piracy.

Tags: bittorrent, bittorrent entertainment network, BittorrentEntertainmentNetwork, content, download, legit, movie downloads, MovieDownloads, store, video

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Gronk said 9:16PM on 2-25-2007

"After helping thousands of internet users to download illegal copies".... actually its only "illegal" in certain countries. In others, not so. Copyright law varies from country to country.

If you want to make an "ethical" debate about the downloading, well now that's a completely different animal.

Mythor said 9:17PM on 2-25-2007

Um, BitTorrent has ALWAYS been legit. It's all the other things people have done with it, and the way people have used it, that hasn't always been legit.
And this is far from the first legitimate use BT technology has been used for - the World of Warcraft patcher uses BT to download new patches and a huge number of Linux distros have .torrent files nowadays...

If the videos are open to people outside the US then that could make things interesting.

Rid said 9:18PM on 2-25-2007

I have always wondered... why would anyone seed in a situation like this? What is the incentive? I would certainly feel no loyalty towards an online store which charges the same fees. Why waste my bandwidth (capped on many providers) or CPU cycles to save some other company bandwidth fees?

JodieM said 7:35AM on 2-26-2007

Well lets just hope that the rest of us in the world outside of the US can use this service. Itunes TV for us outside US is a useless joke!!!!

Ron said 12:10PM on 2-26-2007

"Because I don't think it's fair to say that BitTorrent is in the same league as Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple at this point."

Brad Linder, do you mind explaining the basis for that opinion? If the figures you cite are accurate (3,000 movies, and "several thousand" television episodes, 1,000 video games, 1,000 music videos) then that level of content blows Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple COMBINED out of the water. Add the fact that the Xbox 360 can stream DRMed WMP11 files using Windows Media Connect or Media Center Extender and I think we may have a winner here.

Brad Linder said 12:14PM on 2-26-2007

Ron, I didn't mean to say that BitTorrent's service or offering were inferior to the other companies. But its brand recognition is much lower. If BitTorrent was the first company to offer a legal video download service, or if they were offering a service that was vastly different and superior to their competitors, perhaps they could gain a significant market share or even dominate the market. We've seen plenty of companies with little name recognition become huge successes on the internet.

But the folks who already know about BitTorrent are largely people who use the technology to get content for free, and they're not going to be that excited about the ability to pay for something they can already do for free. And I just don't see the rest of the world jumping on the BitTorrent bandwagon when they can get a similar experience from Amazon or Apple.

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