Finally, someone has decided to use the excellent BitTorrent system as a means of distribution and sale of legal movie files. But alas, the plan seems flawed, as they are the same price as a physical product and also are served up with an unhealthy dose of good old DRM. Too bad, as the DVD movies will be available at the same time they are offered on retail shelves. In addition, you can snag a Warner TV show for a dollar, but let's face it - we can get them for free off the air or whatever, legally and without any DRM controls!
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The downloads will not therefore work on other PCs or standard DVD players. Other Hollywood studios are now likely to launch similar services. They believe movie fans will prefer to pay a reasonable price for a legal downloaded movie rather than risk illegally swapping a computer file that could contain viruses or be a poor quality copy of a film. ADVERTISEMENT
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Reasonable price? How can something so hobbled, offered at the same price as a physical product, be considered reasonable? Physical DVD movie products come on media, they need to be manufactured somewhere, then packaged, distributed and handled by employees. Plus, the standard DVD movie disc can be used on both a PC and a DVD player. Finally, who in the Internet community is going to want to waste their precious bandwidth seeding this thing? Without tons of computers uploading these files, BitTorrent is useless. It is hard to imagine folks hosting these wares for Warner for free so that they and BitTorrent can make a nice profit.
Source: BBC News
