BitTorrent offers legal downloads

BitTorrent is launching a legal download service to offer movies, music, TV shows and games to its subscribers.

The revamped site will have about 3,000 movies and TV shows available from companies such as Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount and MTV.

"The vast majority of our audience just loves digital content," BitTorrent president and co-founder Ashwin Navin told Associated Press.

"Now we have to program for that audience and create a better experience for that content so the audience converts to the service that makes the studios money."

Navin believes that the move will be a success because BitTorrent already has 135 million users, and the distributed model means that downloads are much faster than on other services.

A full-length movie download from BitTorrent should take about 30 minutes, and a TV episode around 10 minutes.

BitTorrent is also hoping that the pricing will be attractive enough to encourage its members to pay for legal downloads rather than take their chances with illegal copies.

"We are really hammering the studios to take it easy on this audience as we need to give them a price that feels like good value compared to what they were getting for free," explained Navin.

New movies are priced at $3.99 and older films at $2.99. High-definition TV episodes will cost $2.99 and standard definition $1.99. Paid for content is currently only available to US subscribers.

The BitTorrent Entertainment Network also intends to offer community services where users can upload their own videos and movies for others to watch for free.

BitTorrent's content is protected by Windows Media DRM and will only play using Windows Media Player. This may put off some users who wish to watch movies in other formats such as a portable media player.