BitTorrent co-founder and president Ashwin Navin believes that ad-supported content is the future of Internet delivery, not downloads hobbled by DRM (digital rights management), even as his company gets ready to open an online movie store that will use DRM as it competes with Amazon's Unbox and Apple's iTunes. It will launch in the U.S. this year and then expand to other countries.

He explained to IDG News: "The bottom line is that DRM is bad for the content provider and it's bad for the consumer, and the reason it's being used today is because we're in the very early stages of a new product cycle for the entertainment industry and they want to walk before they run."

He added: "I think the future will not be marked by digital rights management. It will be marked by advertising-supported content that's clear of DRM, because the content publisher wants it to be as widely distributed as possible and consumed over as many platforms as possible. And we hope to be part of that evolution, and to drive that evolution wherever we can."

Mr. Navin explained that he thinks DRM is bad because it "ties a user to one hardware platform, so if I buy my all my music on iTunes, I can't take that content to another hardware environment or another operating platform."

Despite the fact that BitTorrent's store will also offer DRM, he expects it to differ from Amazon and Apple's offerings by "leveraging BitTorrent delivery to get people their content faster, particularly for files that are popular. And we want to aggregate content that no one else is aggregating as well ... [We want to] pull together a community at BitTorrent that is really depending on us for delivering content that's not easily available, stuff that's not at Wal-Mart and all the other retail locations."

On the hardware side, the company is working with manufacturers to embed compatibility with the BitTorrent store in their devices. Mr. Navin noted that owners of such devices will be able to "tap into [the BitTorrent store] even away from their PC," although he didn't say if that will come through built-in Wi-Fi or some other functionality.