Bram Cohen launches legal BitTorrent download service
Written on February 26, 2007 – 2:59 pm | by admin
Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol that is currently widely used online to share movies, music and software has launched bittorrent.com as a legal download service. The company signed deals with the large media networks and they can offer a number of movies and TV shows for sale and rental for a fee. In addition, subscribers can purchase music and video games while older movies that are no longer protected by copyright are also available.
Distribution is done via the decentralized BitTorrent network reducing bandwidth costs for Bram’s company making it a much more viable alternative to something such as YouTube of Google Video. Media are DRM protected and can only be played on registered systems. For example, a purchased movie can be played an unlimited number of times on two different devices while a rented movie can only be played on a single device for a 24-hour period.
Users can rent newly released movies for $3.99 and older ones for $2.99 while TV episodes for shows such as 24 can be purchased for $1.99. Cohen’s target audience are the 135 million users of BitTorrent who already use the software to download such media illegally in violation of copyright.
This is another blow for Google’s YouTube which is having a hard time convincing the networks to license content to them. In the last 7 days, another startup, Joost, inked a deal with the media companies to stream TV shows online. BitTorrent’s success could be another indication that Google wasted their money when they paid $1.65 billion for YouTube.