Warner Bros Will Distribute Movies And TV-Shows Via BitTorrent
Written by Ernesto on May 09, 2006
Warner Bros will announce today that it plans to sell movies and TV-shows online. They are going to use BitTorrent to distribute their content, again a huge step forward for BitTorrent.
A single TV-show will cost $1 and a movie will be the same price as a regular DVD.
Warner Bros president Kevin Tsujihara thinks that his company can fight the increasing losses that piracy “caused”, by offering their customers the option to download movies and TV-shows legally.
“If we can convert 5, 10 or 15 percent of the illegal downloaders into consumers of our product, that is significant.”
The new service will start this summer.
If you don't like torrents try MP3 Fiesta. They hold nearly 67,000 albums from nearly 17,000 artists. Prices are around the $0.10 mark for single tracks with full albums coming in at roughly $1.00. Tracks are available from 192kbps and they take major credit cards and PayPal
Previously: P2P Wikipedia
Next: Video Game Media Torrents
4 Responses (Add yours)
I thought a tv show (particularly, on a station like WB (CW) was paid for by commercials; how could they charge a buck for that? (10-1 bet: the paid TWICE for torrented tv shows will still have commercials in them).
And, how could they sell a move “the same price as a regular DVD” when the movie download obviously won’t have the ’same’ quality, navigation options, special features..plus, IF the file could be burned to dvd (and is not encrypted with some DRM crap), the customer would be performing his/her own burning and providing his/her own dvd to do so.
Pending more encouraging information, this marketing strategy, as proposed, is bogus. I’d pay the network $1 to retract their stupid announcement.
To oversimplify: TV shows are paid for ‘per broadcast’ by the stations and the stations recoup their investment with the ads they insert. This one dollar charge seems reasonable to me since many of these shows still have to pay residuals to the actors, etc. It also helps to pay for putting the content out there from a clean source (or so one hopes).
I do however agree that selling movie downloads for “the same price as as a regular DVD” is foolish; especially since anyone who pays the MSRP for ANYTHING lacks shopping sense and deserves to be broke. I hate paying full price for anything…thats what club memberships and coupons are for. Why would I want to pay MORE than retail for a movie? After all, if I have to provide my own storage medium and use valuable time and space on my computer, that will increase MY cost….So unless I can save money somewhere along the way by downloading instead of purchasing the DVD why would I even want to?
WB definately needs to rethink that part of things. I suggest at least a 40 percent savings to make it competitive. Otherwise I’d just wait a few weeks and buy it used from a pawnshop.
What a good time to start doing this when nearly all isp’s are capping p2p.
A nice idea, even though it may be easily misused… if anyone buys a torrent file and uploads it somewhere else, if possible… (Is real security against leechers, except for mass ip bans PER SEED, even possible?)
And I really wonder which quality these files will have… probably less than the now-common uploads…
(Along with a nice new copy security of course…)
But not to predict the apocalypse before the creation, let’s look how well this works…
Add your response