The movie studios that have agreed to sell their content on the peer-to-peer file sharing service are Hart Sharp Video, Egami Media (a subsidiary of Image Entertainment), Koch Entertainment and The Orchard. The four company’s content runs the gamut from documentaries, feature-length and short films, to live music concerts, comedy specials and TV shows.
The deal calls for the independent studios’ content to be sold as part of a subscription service, not the PPV model that BitTorrent plans on implementing with Warner Bros.
“This shows that BitTorrent is an aggregator of content outside the major movie studios,” Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent’s co-founder and president, told CNET News. “We’ll be able to offer consumers a subscription service that will be comprehensive.”
BitTorrent enables users to download content from a variety of sources by breaking down a file into smaller fragments, typically a quarter of a megabyte in size. Peers download missing fragments from each other and upload those that they already have to peers that request them.
Once considered the scourge of Hollywood for its complicity in allowing pirated content to be shared on its network, major movie studios have exhibited a surprising turnaround, embracing the profit and viral marketing potential of file sharing networks.
“We’ve been struggling with peer-to-peer technology and trying to figure out a way to harness the good in all that the technology allows us to do,” Kevin Tsujihara, president of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group, told the New York Times. “If we can convert 10 or 15 percent of the illegal downloaders into consumers of our product, that is significant.”