BitTorrent starts movie service; smart move?
The BBC News reported that BitTorrent, the official bittorrent website owned by the ‘fathers’ of bittorrent, is now offering movies online to download. I was amazed as I thought BitTorrent opened up their own torrent tracker, just like ThePirateBay or IsoHunt, sadly this wasn’t quite the case.
While Bittorrent indeed offers movies to download, sadly they’re all coming with the ‘enemy of freedom’, DRM – also known as ‘Digital Rights Management’ – which will restrict you heavily on the things you’ll be allowed to do with your purchases. A couple of the restrictions; bought TV shows are available inifitily, but movies will only be playable for 30 days – quite wierd as you paid for it.
Even more weird considering the fact the movie industry is supposed to save money on downloads; they wont have to package the DVD’s, ship them, finance the part of the retailers, all they need is bandwidth, which is relatively cheap, especially since they will be sharing it using the Bittorrent techniques, which will let everyone upload as well, making the load on their actual servers even lower than with a regular service.
Another thing I thought was ‘wow, nice to see a movie & music shop compatible with linux’, sadly this also isn’t the case. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to download the files and all as you can of course open torrents on your open source powered computer – you just wont be able to play them. The only media player supporting these files is Windows Media Player, which only runs fluently on Windows, not even on a Macintosh. In addition to this limit of media players, you also wont be able to burn those files in order to be able to watch them on your regular TV and perhaps even home cinema.
I personally think it’s a smart move to see the music industry move towards bittorrent as it can be a huge cost savier. However, I don’t feel like this is right, the movies are still rated at $4, which is very close to the DVDs available for rent, which will give you a lot more freedom, such as being able to watch it on your own TV or non-Windows computer. In addition to that your own bandwidth will also be consumed by these torrents, without any compensation from their end, which isn’t fair at all, especially for those users who are on a tight bandwidth limit by their provider. I honestly doubt this will be succesful.
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