BitTorrent and Warner Brothers have signed a deal to distribute Warner TV and movies using the BitTorrent protocol. No one will say what the deal will be for the shows, though, nor whether there's going to be any DRM. This is consistent with my experience with Warners — they're smart enough to embrace new tech, but with enough aggro, anti-audience executives in the chain to screw it up with crippleware that no one wants. My guess is that they won't say whether there's DRM because the anti-DRM people in Warners are locked in a death-match with the pro-DRM side.
After all, every Warner Bros movie is already downloadable using a BitTorrent tracker, for free, at DVD-or-better resolution. That's not to say they won't have customers for a legal download service, provided the price is right. Apple has customers for iTunes, even though all that music is available free on P2P networks. The question is, will DRM make sales or cost sales?
One thing I think we can all agree on is that no one will choose to buy a Warners movie because of the DRM. No one wants DRM in their movies. No one wants a way to do less with their movies.
Anyone who wants to get the movies without DRM can — just get it from a P2P network. So the presence of DRM can only serve to turn some potential customers — people willing to pay, but not willing to have their computers taken over by invasive DRM rootkits and spyware — into non-customers.
Time will tell if Warners can muster the political will to break its DRM addiction. The service launches in early summer.
Update: Timo sez, "Warner has a similar serivce online in Germany already. They call it
In2Movies (nice German name, eh?). They don't use BT,
but a similar, yet proprietary P2P protocol called GNAB. Movies come in Windows-Media-DRM, in inferior quality, cost about the
same as the DVDs, and contain no bonus stuff or original language
soundtracks. Users get credits for sharing the encrypted files. So for uploading
Harry Potter around 40 times (40x2GB) you get another movie for free. The bug-ridden client is written in .NET. Altogether, nasty stuff."
