BitTorrent Video Download Store Falls Flat

seriously writes "We've all heard about BitTorrent going legit this week with legal movie and TV show downloads. Ars Technica took a look at the service to see how usable it was and ran into a few snags, including not being able to download or even open the video files on some computers. However, the ones that they did manage to open varied a lot in quality. Overall, they blame DRM: 'Without knowing whether browser compatibility and dysfunctional video files are a rare occurrence or not, it's hard to say whether BitTorrent's service is a good one overall. Our initial experiences have been disappointing and frustrating, and guess what the culprit is once again? DRM. Why the DRM failed to work on 50% of our purchases is not clear, but whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable.'"

Why bother?

[Creepy Crawler]

Wow. What a crock of shit. I wanted to see what exactly these movies they offered, and well.. They speak for themselves.

In the Sci-Fi category.

4d Man "rent"
A Clockwork Orange "rent"
Alice in Wonderland Broadway production "rent"
Buncha "Alien" movies. "all rent"
Animatrix "own"

Yuck. I wouldnt even download this garbage from Thepiratebay.com , and they're free. I also looked at other sections that piqued my interest, and the similar veneer of crap was about them all.

Why should I pay for a "rental" or a "own" when there are plenty of websites that provide it for free, along with more rights than I would gain with "bittorrent.com" ?

Answer that, and you solve the majority of piracy. And shutting those sites down is not an acceptable answer, as the USA interests are not shared globally.

Is the objection to DRM or Microsoft DRM

[Albanach]

So bittorrent offers films to rent. I can't see a way this can be implemented without DRM. Otherwise you haven't rented it, you now own the file

So, is the argument that we shouldn't be able to rent a film using our computer or is it just a complaint that they use a poorly implemented Microsoft DRM that isn't compatible across platforms. If, say, Real who already offer applications on each platform were to make some DRM that works on *nix, OS X and Windows would the /. crowd then support it?

I can't see how services like this can be delivered without some way to restrict viewing after a period of time. Is there another option I'm missing?

Re:WHY?

[cdrguru]

The one way that DRM can work is replacing the "personal computer" in home environments with a dedicated entertainment appliance.

This has numerous advantages for the home user because it can be immune to viruses, spyware and trojans. It can provide a superior entertainment experience apart from what constitutes a "home PC" today. And, it can be cheaper because there will be fewer options and support will be much, much cheaper.

And, because it is controlled, DRM can absolutely work. 100% of the time, just like CSS works on a DVD player today.

Forget WebTV. Think OLPC for home entertainment.

Re:DRM to be considered harmful

[drinkypoo]

After HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs being locked out of people who didn't buy DHCP-enabled monitors, video cards and an encrypted video path to view them... This is not even a surprise to me.

They're not locked out, they're reduced to a lower resolution. You can still watch them.

In the end, the easiest thing for a consumer to do will be to just open up The Pirate Bay and type the name of a movie they want. It's sure to work wherever they want, provided they have the codec to play it. And if they don't, they can convert it to MPEG-2, or any other such standard.

If they don't have a codec to play it, they probably don't have a codec to convert it.

Consumers do not want to buy a separate version of their music for their iPod, their Zune, their Gigabeat, their [insert name of portable Flash/USB player here], etc. They don't want to spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars on new technology to hear what they want, either. Audio CDs have worked for nearly two decades. This goes for video as well. The *AA's need to realise that.

Of course, if you buy the CD and rip it, you don't have DRM problems. Just a copyright flag that pretty much all software and even hardware ignores.

Then again, it's what Apple and Microsoft want: to lock people into their player, so that they must buy another if it breaks.

The paranoid among us might believe that Steve Jobs would release an open letter condemning DRM just to take the heat off Apple for using DRM. It might even be true. But I don't that's actually all that likely.

Microsoft, on the other hand, definitely operates through vendor lock-in.

Apple has never been the most open company or anything, but they're not as bad as Microsoft in that way. (They are worse in others; they have been known to attempt to hide evidence of their abuse of customers. So I think they both suck.)

Re:short term profit

[Znork]

"used to create insane amounts of marketing, world-wide."

And, of course, the insane amount of marketing is needed to counter the insane amount of marketing that other makers get. Essentially making sure a large part of the capital available from the end-consumer goes, not to fund more movies, but to maintain a pointless marketing war that neither consumers nor creators want or benefit from.

fail on purpose

[Loconut1389]

Is there any chance bittorrent is doing this to make a mockery of DRM and send subliminal messages to just download the (illegal) torrent instead?

Why?

[init100]

Why would anyone sponsor the big movie companies with their bandwidth, storage and cpu power? I fail to see why anyone would want to do that without receiving a piece of the action, i.e. monetary compensation. This is just a plot by the movie companies to be able to sell movies and have the users pay for the infrastructure.

Re:Why?

[sikandril]

This is what big media fails to see - the key issue is high bandwidth, high quality content. Give us DRM free, DVD quality downloads which stream consistently at 350 KB per second and we'll be happy to pay 1-4$ per movie. Oh you want more? Sorry chump, times have changed and your product has devaluated. You need to give me something which is easier and better than searching for a torrent, waiting for the download, taking the risk of a defective / low quality file etc. It ain't rocket science.

Tried it. It sucked. Now how do I pay the artist?

[Anonymous Coward]

So I decided to go legit. Been working on a windows laptop lately so the OS restriction wasn't stopping me from enjoying the brave world of new media downloads.

My friends told me that Little Miss Sunshine was a wonderful heartwarming film. Sounded like a perfect mood lifter. So I headed over to Bittorrent.com, signed myself up and with little hassle got myself a nice link to a .torrent. I started downloading the movie with the Bittorrent client and was getting reasonable service. (100 KB/s from each of two bittorrent.com servers and 20 KB/s from a real peer. Not the beautiful image of piece of the file flying to me from all over the net, but I was getting what I wanted and it was during the first few hours of the service going live.)

The problems started when I tried to play the movie. I launched the downloaded file in windows media player 11, and immediately hit a roadblock. There were some messages to respond to, perhaps signing in with my BT.com username + pw, then a message stating that I had a limit of 2 machines to try this on. Click OK. Number goes to on. Sure. Giving me an extra. OK. Then I get the message the the good folks at ARS got about WMP "encountering a problem." Cancel and retrying gets me nowhere, so I try the "Web help" option" which turns out to be a page about updating the sound drivers. I try windows update - nothing there. I try the freshest drivers from the sound card manufacturer. I still get the same message. I Google the error code. Many links later I get one helpful tidbit from a support forum (non-MN) to downgrade to WPM 10. Desparate I go for it. I use add/remove to downgrade to WMP 9, my previously installed version. I try to play the movie just to see what will happen even though I know BT.com tells me to use 10 or 11. Now I get a message telling me that I'm out of licenses. I guess I'm out $3.99, too.

Having paid for the movie, I decide to download it the old fashioned way. It took the pressure of having to watch it in 24 hours off, which is nice since I'm pretty busy and might like to watch it over a couple of nights. The download took a bit longer, but it worked. The movie played when I hit play. I was touched by the experiences of the quirky people. I had no headaches fiddling with driver updates, support forums, WMP downgrades, time-limited and disappearing licenses. I'll probably delete the file soon, as I don't watch too many films twice. Kind of like a rental. I just wish they would make it easier for me to pay them. I mean what do I do for my next rental? Do I go to BT.com, pay ignore their DRM torrent and find my own? Seems kind of silly. If I'm paying I'd like to get the higher download speeds. (YYMV, but my "community torrents" go slower that the one I got from BT.com.) This method would also work for when I switch back to Linux.

Any suggestions? I do believe in paying the artist - enough so that I'm willing to pay the media giant that stands between us.

-Jon