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.

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6 Responses

1 May 10, 2006 at 19:35 by corypolo

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.

2 May 15, 2006 at 16:14 by JD Kunz

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.

3 May 23, 2006 at 04:39 by suck-it-and-see

What a good time to start doing this when nearly all isp’s are capping p2p.

4 Jan 28, 2008 at 23:40 by Crynsos

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…

5 Jun 05, 2008 at 23:18 by Lance

Funny how one month they’re saying that Bit Torrents will run them out of business, then the next month they offer them, at ridiculous rates. Granted .99 cents is 1/2 what iTunes charges, which is curious considering why they left, but to think that retail for a DVD is going to generate revenue shows that someone needs serious drug counseling.

6 Jun 15, 2008 at 11:06 by theymustbenuts

they must be nuts. what are they going to charge, 19.99 for a DVD downloaded? Why in the world would I do that? Maybe if I was raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars and also working in an antarctic station I might fork out that kind of dough. Why don’t they just sell it to us for what they sell it to Walmart or Blockbuster for?
I’ll make you a deal Warner, I’ll pay full price for your movies if I can return it for a full refund if it is crap like 99% of pictures are these days.

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