SubscribeThe BitTorrent Entertainment Network disappoints
Posted in IPTV, News on March 5th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
Last week we reported the launch of the BitTorrent Entertainment Network. Today we can report on the reviews of BitTorrent’s new venture. The general feeling is of disappointment, and the cause of it is the way DRM has been implemented and their price choices.
To fight piracy iTunes sells convenience: trouble free, easy to find & download contents. Even though iTunes contents have DRM, they seem to be flexible enough for most consumers. The BitTorrent Entertainment Network makes it easy to find and buy contents, but offers more trouble than convenience to the consumer: DRM failures rendering purchases useless, compatibility limited to Windows XP, having to be online to confirm your license before watching anything, and a painful authentication process.
On top of this, the pricing scheme they decided to implement is clearly overpriced when compared to buying a DVD. It also offers little incentives compared to renting a movie offline. It’s not only that content owners are saving money not printing their contents on a CD or a DVD, like in iTunes. With Bittorrent, they are not even investing in bandwidth costs from the distribution of said contents. Somehow all this savings are not reflected on the consumer’s final price tag.
As it is right now, Bram Cohen is going to need more than soft porn to make this work.
Related: Bram Cohen Interview on his new BitTorrent Entertainment Network (Via Digg)
1 Comment
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Thanks for pointing to those reviews of BitTorrent. I’m disappointed as well — as I was hoping this would be a serious tv-over-the-web option. Perhaps I was overoptimistic.
I think a lot of these ventures will be unsuccessful until there is a solid, advertising-supported model in place for watching content online. (Shelly Palmer posted a pretty solid analysis of this
recently, which seems to hit on the head.)
I must say though — I’m not surprised about BitTorrent failing. Napster has failed as well. It doesn’t seem like “a sure thing” to turn a piracy-based business into a mainstream, legitimate company.
- Tessa
Comment by Tessa on March 5, 2007