The admonition “keep your friends close and your enemies even closer” has never been more true that today with the launch of BitTorrent.com which has wooed Hollywood into this noble experiment featuring 1,000+ feature films available for legal download at a price points between $1.99 – $3.99. What makes this a hot story is that BitTorrent is a peer to peer (P2P) client historically used for trading in pirated movies. But forward-thinking studios like Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount and now Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer are looking to convert pirates into paying customers. In a New York Times article entitled “Software Exploited by Pirates Goes to Work for Hollywood” it was summed up succinctly:

“We like the idea that they have millions of users worldwide. That is potentially fertile, legitimate ground for us.”

Doug Lee Executive Vice President New Media MGM

This is more than just a good soundbite. It’s a good use of a great technology. Because what makes BitTorrent so attractive is the way files are distributed. Rather than a download from a central server – the Apple iTunes Store model – movies are downloaded from multiple computers simultaneously, each grabbing a tiny piece of the overall movie.

BitTorrent greatly reduces the load on seeders, because clients for the most part download files from each other. In this animation, the coloured bars beneath all of the clients represent individual pieces of the file. After the initial pieces transfer from the seed, the pieces are individually transferred from client to client. This demonstrates how the original seeder only needs to send out one copy of the file for all the clients to receive a copy.(from Wikipedia) This architecture greatly reduces server load, shifts the cost of the bandwidth from the content provider to the consumer and has the added benefit of making popular titles download faster. I have used various open source versions of this code for about two years now and have watched it improve significantly over time. Because of its robust encryption technology, it is also well suited for distribution of corproate video to geographically dispersed offices. The only problem I see so far? The formal BitTorrent release today is only available for Windows XP (yuck) and relies upon Microsoft’s Windows Media Player (choke). But for $1.99 what have you got to lose in trying this one out? Give it a shot! And for a giggle, read the Motion Picture Association of America’s “you are evil” P2P diatribe.