DRM Killing BitTorrent.com Video Store
The BitTorrent Video Store that was launched less than two weeks ago is facing some serious DRM issues. It is virtually impossible to play a great deal of the Movies and TV-shows they sell on computers that have a graphics driver older than 20 months.
I haven’t been able to test the BitTorrent Entertainment Network myself since I don’t live in the US, but several people told me that there are some serious issues with their DRM.
P2PBlog did review the BitTorrent store and comes to the same conclusion as most others: There are some serious DRM issues, that make it impossible to play hundreds of titles without taking extreme measures.
It seems that approximately 25% of the content in the store has such tight restrictions, that it wont play on computers with a graphics driver older than 20 months. A simple update in Windows wont help either, so BitTorrent suggests to download a third party application called modtool, to fix this issue. Eh..?
Bram Cohen already said to TorrentFreak that “the DRM issue is causing an awful lot of headaches”, but I guess that’s just an understatement.
To make it even worse, the movies and TV-shows on the BitTorrent.com be protected with some extra DRM in the near future. Earlier this week Macrovision announced that their analog copy protection, will be used on BitTorrent.com, as well as other video services like Netflix and Movielink. Brilliant!
This is exactly why most people wont stop pirating movies and TV-shows. DRM protected products can’t compete with the “illegal” counterparts. Why would one bother going through all the DRM hassle, if he or she can find superior (no DRM) content for free?
