| Posted in Articles | Posted on
As part of the deals, BitTorrent users will be able to purchase or rent movies such as "Mission Impossible III" and buy TV shows such as "24" when the company's service launches in February.
The deals follow a similar one San Francisco-based BitTorrent struck earlier this year with Warner Bros.
BitTorrent's moves come amid a flurry of activity in the budding online video industry.
In recent months, Apple Computer debuted its own movie downloading service, AT&T began offering a similar service to its DSL and satellite TV customers and Microsoft announced agreements with Paramount and Warner Brothers to offer movie downloads to its Xbox 360 game console.
The movie studios and television networks are responding to consumers who are spending increasing amounts of time and money on the Internet or playing video games instead of watching television or movies, analysts say.
They also are trying to learn from the music industry's bruising and costly battle with digital distribution by embracing, rather than fighting, the technology, said Mike McGuire, vice president of research in the San Jose offices of Gartner.
"Over the next couple of years, you're going to see a whole bunch of this experimentation from the studios and the networks," he said.
The deals with BitTorrent collectively represent one of the more interesting experiments. The company's software has been widely used to distribute pirated movies and other files over the Internet.
But BitTorrent -- and the video industry -- is hoping to use its popularity to its advantage by building its new video distribution service around the software.
That should give it an advantage over rival video download sites, said Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent's president and co-founder. Typical digital media stores, such as Apple's iTunes, distribute files from a central bank of computers. That system can lead to lengthy waits for files when many users are trying to access the servers.
In contrast, BitTorrent's software is a peer-to-peer system. Users upload files as well as download them, broadening the number of distribution points. As particular files becomes more popular, more of BitTorrent's customers will have them on their computers, and thanks to its software, will help in distributing them.
"We guarantee it will be a fast download," Navin said.
That may be the case, but other elements of the company's service are still a bit fuzzy. BitTorrent hasn't said, for instance, how much it will charge for downloads. And while the company promises to have "thousands" of titles available when the service launches, it's listed very few of them to date.
Regardless, the company has a tough challenge ahead of it. Apple, with its dominance of digital music, has the inside track to be the leader in video as well, analysts say.
And one key drawback of BitTorrent's service, at least at first, is that customers will be able to play downloaded videos only on their computers. Navin says the company plans to let consumers eventually download to portable devices, so they can watch the videos in their living rooms.
Unfortunately for BitTorrent, by the time it gets to the living room, competitors such as Apple and Microsoft will already be there, analysts say.
