Already a year and a half ago, BitTorrent, the company behind the most popular filesharing protocol ever, would create a new and “more legal” platform. It received $10 million from venture capitalists to get the new platform up and running and now it has reached a great milestone. BitTorrent has namely opened up its BitTorrent Entertainment Network, which is simply an online store for music and movies. All of the material is sold or rented legally and BitTorrent has teamed up with several of the major movie studios to be able to offer a large and broad assortment.
“BitTorrent’s newest entertainment network partner is MGM, the legendary Hollywood studio and owner of the world’s largest modern film library. With a roster of over 35 content partners, BitTorrent is offering a breadth and depth of content not found in any other download service. At launch, the network at BitTorrent.com will feature over 5,000 titles of movies, TV shows, PC games and music content, as well as over 40 hours of high-definition (HD) programming.”
The major portion is protected by DRM though, but it will also release material that doesn’t use DRM and can be spread legally. So far the shop seems to focus on rental of movies and music. The movies are of the WMV format but there is no word of the image quality. Superman Returns weighs in at 1.4GB which is far from the size of DVD, but with efficient video compression the result can still be pretty good.
BitTorrent.com is currently targeting the American market and any money made will be the foundation of further expansion of the platform.
