BitTorrent = Rip-off?

I have nothing interesting to post about poker, so I'm going to deviate from the normal topic here and post about something Quatloos alerted me to the other day.

It seems, according to "Variety", BitTorrent has gone "legit". Now, this may come as a surprise to many of you, like those who don't have their heads firmly planted where the sun doesn't shine, as you probably thought BitTorrent had always been legit. Perhaps some people may have used BitTorrent to violate the copy rights of others, but this has nothing to do with the BitTorrent protocol or any of the various and sundry clients available. Indeed, Bram Cohen, the creator of the protocol, has always gone out of his way to emphasize that BitTorrent was created solely for the legitimate distribution of software and other media, with the full permission of the copyright holders.

I'm not going to go into the whole "legit" thing because anyone with a brain knows the Hollyweird view on this is total nonsense. No, what I want to talk about are the specifics of BitTorrent's bending over for the Hollywood lawyers.

So, here's the deal. For prices in the $3-$4 range, you can spend several hours (if you're lucky) downloading a rights-restricted copy of a Hollywood movie. (It appears to be about $2 for the average TV show single episode.) You can only watch this movie via Windows Media Player 10+ because that's what it uses for rights management. You get 30 days after downloading to begin watching the movie. Once you start watching, you must complete your viewing of the movie within 24 hours.

I think somebody tried a scheme like this once before. It was called DivX. (Not that one, the one they named it after to taunt the greedy bastards in Hollywood.) And it failed miserably. And DivX wasn't this restrictive.

I can't believe anyone thinks this is going to fly. Renting from NetFlix is far cheaper than this if you're a regular movie watcher. The quality of the DVD is going to be better. And if you live near a NetFlix distribution center the delivery time won't be all that different.

They do have some free content, so I picked an old movie and started it downloading. It's been moving at a decent clip, but the ETA is wavering in the five to six hour range for a 1.85GB file. I have a cable modem connection that is not even close to maxing out on this. I've seen BitTorrent download rates more than six times faster than this. (If you want to see what BitTorrent can really do, and what it was intended to do, go download OpenOffice with BitTorrent.) Frankly, considering I'm connected to 30 seeds and 21 peers for this one file, the download rate is rather disappointing. I've seen files NOT hosted on a commercial site download way faster than this.

So, let's sum up. You pay more than you're likely to if you rent from NetFlix. You have a limited time to begin watching whatever you download and you have to finish watching within 24 hours of starting. And, oh yeah, you have to help defray their distribution costs by sharing the file over the BitTorrent network while you're downloading. They, of course, hope you'll continue sharing once you've finished downloading so they won't have to shoulder all of that burden. This is a good bet since downloading appears to take hours, and most folks won't be babysitting their client waiting for the movie to finish downloading so they can immediately shut it down.

I'm very disappointed to see BitTorrent go in this direction. It started as a noble effort to improve the speed of large software distributions like Linux, and it has succeeded fabulously in that. If I give them a lot of benefit of the doubt, maybe they've done this just to keep Hollywood's lawyers off their backs and they're hoping as much as I am to see this fall flat. In the meantime, I suppose it won't hurt to check out the free content. "Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women" here I come! I wonder if my free voyage will have to complete within 24 hours?

Add: A couple quick updates. I just noticed they have "mature" titles available for $4. This is actually quite funny since if there's something there's tons and tons of available on BitTorrent, it's "mature" videos. I'm sure they're going to get lots of takers on the $4 downloads you can only watch for 24 hours.

The other thing I noticed is that most of the TV series available via this new BitTorrent service are also available on DVD. And, in most cases, you can buy the complete DVD set for about the same price as the downloads. I suppose you someone might download one episode to see if it's a series they'd be interested in, but, seriously, who's going to go spend $50 on a TV series DVD collection if they don't already know they want it?

ETA on my trip to the Planet of Prehistoric Women has increased to 7 hours. Damn flight delays.

Add#2: My download finished sometime overnight. All I can say is it took more than one hour and less than seven.

I took a quick look at the movie. It's an old film and the source was obviously pretty beat up to start with and a bit on the grainy side. Even taking that into account, this doesn't look like the best encoding job I've ever seen. I'll have to look around some more and see if I can find something newer that might have a better quality source.

It occurred to me that I should make plain I'm not suggesting the BitTorrent folks are raking in money hand over fist on this deal. I'm sure the Hollywood types are the ones making whatever money there is to be made with this. BitTorrent is probably lucky to break even. I'm also sure the incredibly restrictive terms on these rentals are not the doing of BitTorrent. They certainly would have come up with a far better deal for the renters. Only the Hollywood folks could imagine an expensive 24-hour rental to be something that would fly.