Bittorrent for movie distribution
Nathan is commenting on the use of bittorrent to distribute movies and has a moderately more optimisic view of the end results than me, but I concede that if the bittorrent complexity is properly hidden from the user that Warner Brothers will be sucessful in their efforts. Pricing will have to be a lot cheaper than DVD's for this to work in my opinion if they plan on having people put up with the key entering and such.
I think the ease of use is going to make this completely undesireable for the regular bittorrent user. It will however make a decent backend for a studio designed user interface which hides the bittorrent methods from the user.
One side effect of their doing this may be the increase of average user upload speeds. I am personally suffering with a 40kbps upload speed aside my really fast 735KBps download speeds on my Brighthouse Networks (Roadrunner) cable modem. I like the download speed just fine, but having crappy upload speeds is a nightmare.
Maybe if the broadband operators see the upload pipes regularly saturated they will deal with these problems.
posted by JonnyRo @ 10:12 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
You know, World of Warcraft uses a seamless updating system whose backend is bittorrent. Like you said, it can be done transparently.
Although you know my argument is always that the user just be forced to learn those technical innards, anyway. ;)
I was unaware that WoW used bittorrent for it's backend. That's pretty cool.
Shrug about people being forced to learn. I think about how much people can be expected to learn a lot, and wobble back and forth on my opinion.
I never understand why the movie studios are so hell bent on locking down movie content on PC's. It's not like some release group isnt going to take that same video from a DVD source, rip, and take online anyway.
Let people pay for your stuff and dont criminalize them.
If they want to use a platform that can at the same time make stuff easy for users and keep the user from copying off to other devices, why not use a TiVo. The DRM on PC's just feels wrong and is invasive as hell. The TiVo already has the media access key stuff, which means that if you give out TiVo encrypted content you have to pass along your Media Access Key, in most cases.
This is not to say that a competant user cant use the Directshow codecs to reencode the video into a non encrypted codec, but you are already talking about a pro here, who is likely going to be able to get a pure source of the video from some other source.
Make it hard, but not so hard that you irritate paying customers.
I think it's impossible to make it too hard. The state of things now is how it will be forever more unless the MPAA/RIAA give up their fruitless fight.
The bottom line is that there will always be ways to glean restricted content, and there will always be people smart enough to do so, and people devious enough to distribute it in such an easy way that anybody can learn how to get it (either by using BT, Kazaa2, or whatever method's popular for the time). It's the industries' all-or-nothing take that's really shooting their feet right now.
Though I guess if they managed to somehow leverage something as low-level as ISPs or something, then maybe they could someday make it TOO hard.
But you've exactly highlighted the most practical argument against DRM... It has failed completely to prevent piracy, and thus the millions the industry spends on its R&D are wasted, except to make it more inconvenient and sometimes downright dangerous for the average, legit user.
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