Azureus Partners with the BBC to Sell TV Shows
The popular BitTorrent client, Azureus has just struck a deal with the BBC to offer TV shows on its recently launched content store/website, Zudeo.
Zudeo is Azureus’ new video sharing website and content store. It implements many ‘Web 2.0′ features like the ability to rate content, leave comments, share torrents and links to submit content to popular social bookmarking sites like digg.
The BBC will sell the following shows on Zudeo:
Red Dwarf, Strange, Invasion Earth, Little Britain, Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, Coupling, Keeping Up Appearances, League of Gentlemen and Ideal.
Ironically, British customers will not be able to purchase any of the shows as they will only be available to U.S. customers. The rest of the world is going to have to wait for now. One of the BBC’s most popular shows, The Office is missing from the list.
The Zudeo site has also lost the ‘beta’ tag and seems to be ready for the primetime. I had the chance to use the Mac OS X client (still in beta). It is polished, light, launches quickly and really seems like a ready product. The content store looks similar to the iTunes Store and is relatively easy to navigate. The Zudeo client is different from the normal Azureus app, although it has the same name. It also appears to no longer be Open Source, we were unable to find the source code of it on Sourceforge. The last recorded entry in the changelog is 2.5.0.0.
