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BitTorrent Co-Founder: Ad-Supported Content Will Defeat DRM

Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 3:00 PM - by

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.

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stuartea said:

member since 08 Aug 2005 with 327 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Sep 22, 2006 3:39 pm

I hate adverts. (Unless they're making me money) : )

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Brutno said:

member since 28 Aug 2002 with 198 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Sep 22, 2006 3:54 pm

" because the content publisher wants it to be as widely distributed as possible and consumed over as many platforms as possible."

He forgot one thing - the content publisher wants to CHARGE the consumer for every platform variant, and is scared witless by what consumers will do with content once it's on their machine. His is a specious argument designed to promote BitTorrent - nothing more.

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Biff said:

member since 08 Apr 2004 with 1479 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Sep 22, 2006 4:06 pm

I've got an idea! I'll start an online music store business! Oh wait I need an angle... I know! I will leverage my anti-establishment image and act like I'm looking out for the little people! It's perfect!

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Mikuro said:

member since 15 Jun 2002 with 457 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Sep 22, 2006 7:51 pm

I might agree with him, but the fact that he WILL be using DRM kind of puts his credibility at minus-one-hundred.

And while I think corporations might dig the advertisement idea, I think users would hate it. For a corporate standpoint, embedding ads practically eliminates the dangers of file-swapping, because...well, a swapped file would still have the ads. It would make popularity (and thus pricing) difficult to estimate, but not impossible.

But what kind of psycho wants ads in their music? Wouldn't any iTunes-like ad-based service need to put an ad in every song? Yeah, customers will really eat that up...

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horvatic said:

member since 27 Jun 2003 with 102 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Sep 22, 2006 9:45 pm

Advertising support won't do anything. Most people are trying to get away from advertising. Besides the record and movie industry is totally committed to copy protecting there media and won't sell any of it online unless it has some form of DRM.

That's why iTunes has DRM and everyone else too. It's not because Apple wanted to add DRM it is because the record and movie industry requires it, period! That's what DRM is all about in the first place and has nothing to do with how much you sell or not. The reason iTunes is so good is because the DRM they have is less obtrusive then say Microsofts or Amazon's out of the box. You really have to try hard to get any error messages pertaining to DRM.

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horvatic said:

member since 27 Jun 2003 with 102 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Sep 22, 2006 9:48 pm

If the media sold with advertising with bittorrant doesn't have DRM included,the big music and movie sales will not happen because they won't sell anything that isn't copy protected.

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Tiger said:

member since 17 Jun 2003 with 1018 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Sep 22, 2006 9:59 pm

If speed is an underlying "feature", how is BitTorrent even remotely the answer? You grab a video off the Internet and it can take 8-10 hours to download all the various pieces, versus buying the same one from iTunes and downloading it 45 seconds on the SAME broadband connection.

I find his methodology a bit flawed.

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Mikuro said:

member since 15 Jun 2002 with 457 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Sat Sep 23, 2006 12:01 am

Tiger wrote:
If speed is an underlying "feature", how is BitTorrent even remotely the answer? You grab a video off the Internet and it can take 8-10 hours to download all the various pieces, versus buying the same one from iTunes and downloading it 45 seconds on the SAME broadband connection.

I find his methodology a bit flawed.

It's true that many BitTorrent downloads go very slow, at least until they're well-seeded (and then only before they're no longer well-seeded), but that would not be a problem if the torrents were started and backed by professional-strength dedicated servers that could pick up any slack. Basically, it'd be just like downloading from Apple, only you'd be able to download from other sources at the same time. There's no bad news there.

It could actually be a lot better than traditional setups like Apple's, because when for example the iTunes Store gets high traffic, transfer speeds go through the floor. This happens every time there's an announcement. It took upwards of 12 hours for people to download movies on high-speed connections on the day they introduced their movies, for instance. If Apple were using a BitTorrent-like load distribution system, this would not happen, because supply would increase right along with demand. That's what BitTorrent is all about.

Of course, the extent of the benefit would depend on how many people are able/willing to donate their bandwidth to such a service as they download. Current BitTorrent servers survive on the goodwill of the users; everyone knows they need to contribute to keep things running, and since they're getting stuff for free, they're happy to do so. But if people are paying, then...they're paying, so they won't feel an obligation to contribute any further.

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A guest said: (hide)

Sat Sep 23, 2006 6:31 am

Bullshit self promotion.

iTunes is a good example of a user-centric design philosophy driving a busines model. Most of what has come up since iTunes stole the show has been driven by creator-centric design - primaily serving the content provider (yahoo, Napster, Spiral Frog, etc etc,) iTunes has shown that if you create a business model that puts the consumer at the centre of the relationship everyone benefits. Clearly we need some form of DRM - the carbon copy nature of bytes requires it - but designing a DRM that is as unobtrusive as possible seems to be winning for Apple.

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shut in said:

member since 23 Sep 2006 with 1 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Sat Sep 23, 2006 9:55 am

DRM may be the work of the devil but it still has it's place. So how's about this idea for a music store, FREE low quality tracks with restrictive DRM kind of like what iTunes sells now with the option to burn to CD removed and sell CD quality versions DRM free but with a digital watermark, add a few targeted ADs to the free section so if people don't buy you can still make some revenue, granted record labels would probably not go for it but if anybody did do this they would get my money no problem.

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