Bittorrent

[Blitzballer]

Does anyone use the peer to peer file distribution software to obtain what they want? News has surfaced over the past couple of days which is outlined below:

BitTorrent, the San Francisco company that created the most popular software for pirating content on the Web, is launching a marketplace of legal movies on the Internet today.

The site has the blessing of four major studios and about three dozen other publishers of video, games and software.

'BitTorrent has the infrastructure, technology and established user base to significantly move the needle on digital distribution with quick, easy and affordable delivery,' Thomas Lesinski, president of Viacom's Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment, said in a statement.

BitTorrent.com's library will contain more than 3,000 movies and TV shows, rivaling the selection found at CinemaNow and Movielink, legal sites that have long had the blessing of the entertainment industry. Among the movies available for rent for $3.99 are Oscar nominees such as 'Little Miss Sunshine' and 'An Inconvenient Truth.' Older catalog titles will cost $2.99.

Television shows will be available for $1.99 each; high-definition shows will cost $2.99. TV programming will include '24' and 'Prison Break' from News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox, as well as 'Punk'd' and 'Chappelle's Show' from Viacom's MTV Networks and Comedy Central.

Other participating studios include Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, partly owned by Sony, Time Warner's Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and Lions Gate.

The new site represents a big gamble that BitTorrent's core users -- males between 16 and 34 -- will accept the restrictions of a legal marketplace. While BitTorrent boasts that 135 million people have installed its file-sharing software, that software is primarily used to illegally trade copyrighted movies, TV shows, software and music.

'People are fed up with DRM,' said Steve Rubel, a marketing expert at Edelman who writes the blog www.micropersuasion.com. 'People are going to find content elsewhere.'

Jesse Drew, acting director of the technocultural studies program at University of California-Davis, warned that BitTorrent's social aspect could work against the site now that it is competing with traditional companies like Apple, Netflix and Walmart.

'These popular sites come and go so quickly,' he said. 'People forget that it's not just economic models that make them popular, they have a certain mystique, an edginess, a hipness -- they lose that when they enter into a commercial market.'

Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent, said the new site has been carefully constructed to meet the needs of its community, including the capability to self-publish personal content on the BitTorrent network and to edit the site itself. 'We think of our audience not only as customers but as evangelists and creators,' Navin said.

BitTorrent is also offering users a major incentive to respect copyrights: speedy downloads. It has tweaked its peer-to-peer network technology so that movies will be downloaded in minutes -- as compared to hours required by traditional peer-to-peer pirate sites.

The peer-to-peer system -- which is extremely efficient for popular files -- works poorly for more obscure content, because the more copies of a file that exist on the network, the easier and quicker it is to download. To solve this problem, BitTorrent is adding its own bandwidth to the network.

Read more at this site:
http://www.topix.net/content/kri/123...52651209538680

What do you make of Bittorents strategy?

[YopY]

Strategy's good, a while ago something like 75% of all internet traffic was BT traffic (or something), 99% of that was probably illegal. By not supporting those who use Bittorrent to share illegal files (i.e. by not offering those on its own website, this), they give themselves a higher reputation towards movie, music and game companies. Without actually alienating the illegal file sharers, that is.

[Ssj7Crono]

i use Bittorrent quite often, mainly for muliple files on one torrent and video. most torrents download quite fast in comparison to any other psp/sharing program ive use.