BitTorrent Really Wants To Be Hollywood’s Best Bud

Hollywood hates BitTorrent. BitTorrent, however, really feels misunderstood and just wants to be friends. Can these two total opposites wackily come together?

Well, BitTorrent is going to try, at least.

As we all know, torrenting is a highly efficient method of getting large files loaded quickly. This makes it ideal to download pretty much everything which is, of course, the entire problem.

So BitTorrent is trying to set up some way to be associated with getting stuff legally. Essentially, the plan is to give BitTorrent’s 160 million users free stuff and use that as a marketing tactic:

The most recent example he pointed to was the promotion of Tim Ferriss’s new book, “The Four-Hour Chef,” which BitTorrent publicized by making a “bundle” of extra materials, like notes, photos and recipes, available as a free download. Mr. Mason said that 210,000 people downloaded the bundle and another 82,000 continued on to Mr. Ferriss’s Amazon page. He did not yet know how many of those visitors bought a book, but he called the preliminary results “promising.”

As BitTorrent points out, they’re not a media company, but rather a tech company, and they’re popular among the open source software and public domain crowds for being highly efficient.

Translating that into Hollywood success, though, is probably going to be tricky. The MPAA is not exactly a fan of… well… digital distribution in general, and partnering with the company that accidentally opened the door to forcing them to change their business model probably won’t be easy. But BitTorrent should at least try.

Meanwhile, we’ll continue using it for legitimate purposes.

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