DRM Killing BitTorrent.com Video Store
Written by Ernesto on March 07, 2007The 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?
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7 Responses
That’s pathetic, it’s like when you buy a dvd you have to go through an unskippable anti piracy advert. All this just confort me in my illegality.
Yah its pretty sad, I dont know of anybody who has actually made a purchase from the site other than those who have done so for journalistic or technical reasons.
All that fanfare and hooplah, the hugging of movie execs and the BitTorrent Inc. team while proclaiming “peace in our time.”
Yet, sadly enough, all that anybody can hear now is the faint chirping of crickets and a passing breeze.
Is it too early to say “We told you so?”
Its actually kind of said, for I know that Navin and Cohen have essentially been hamstrung in achieving their vision from the very start.
To make matters worse, if the venture does fail, which I think it will if left as is, the movie studios will use at as fodder for their arguments that digital downloads can never succeed, that its a waste of time in fact and that it can never embrace the new medium.
This is exactly what Peter Gutmann talked about in his now-famous article
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
DRM!
Putting good content in a locked box that is harder to open then a CD!
Since 1999!
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