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Bittorrent
BitTorrent is cleaning up its act and making some significant content deals with major Hollywood studios. Following the Warner Bros. deal struck this spring, the bandwidth-hungry service just added 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate Entertainment, and Paramount Pictures to its plate.
You will be able to burn some of these downloads to a DVD, with a few serious caveats. The DRM included with the files limits playback to the device on which you originally recorded the disc, so consumer DVD players are out of the question. Also, some titles can only be viewed a limited number of times before the central DRM store disables your key. For this, you pay full DVD retail prices, although TV episodes could be offered for as little as $1 per show.
Besides the movie studios, cable networks like G4, Comedy Central, MTV, and Nickelodeon also joined the lineup. This influx of legitimate content will power BitTorrent's planned February launch of a media download service, putting films and TV shows like Saw III, X-Men: The Last Stand, and South Park at your fingertips, whenever you're by a computer.
That pricing scheme is likely to hold the service back from true success until the studios realize that we don't want to pay full price for a limited product. It doesn't really matter how I get my South Park fix, as long as I get it when and where I want it. The proposed BitTorrent service won't offer that, and we're not getting it from the likes of Vongo or Movielink, either.
All that being said, I'm somewhat surprised to see Disney missing from the studio list, as that company has shown a certain willingness to enter the dark waters of digital media where its peers don't feel comfortable. On the other hand, that could simply be a vote of no confidence in BitTorrent's solution, as the Mouse waits for something better or works up an in-house alternative.
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