Following in the footsteps of Napster, BitTorrent has now crossed over to the light side. In its day, Napster was hailed as the source for illegal music downloads, and is now a legitimate pay service where you can acquire clean, high quality mp3s for personal use without breaking the law. BitTorrent rose from Napster’s darker past as the replacement offering much more than music. Now the ingenious filesharing technology will be used for good as BitTorrent launches a legitimate path to get your music and movies. And more.
Yahoo News says: offers:
BitTorrent Entertainment Network at BitTorrent.com will offer films and TV shows from 20th Century Fox News Corp, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, Lionsgate Entertainment Corp, closely held Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., Paramount Pictures and Paramount’s sister company, MTV Networks.
San Francisco-based BitTorrent joins Amazon.com, Apple Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc as either having launched or testing download sites. Others in the arena include services from CinemaNow and Movielink.
But BitTorrent’s president and co-founder, Ashwin Navin, told Reuters the site will differentiate itself by going beyond offering only movies or TV shows to providing downloads of music, videos and games.
It’s a rags to riches story, as the free BitTorrent client is now changed into a potential money making empire striking while the downloadable content iron is hot. Unlike the other services, BitTorrent plans to offer games and other media. If the price is right, I would GLADLY pay online for a download of the newest game instead of fighting the lines and stock issues at a retail center. However, right now it looks like the movies are time sensitive “rentals” that can only be viewed on the computer.
The peer sharing ingenuity of BitTorrent makes file transfers faster and more efficient. This technology is already being used to patch online games at record speeds.
You can check out the BitTorrent site HERE
The point is that the service is going LEGAL.
Limewire and Bearshare are littered with viruses and poor quality mp3s. I would sooner pay and get proper quality than to risk viruses for shitty quality mp3s and screener movies.
Napster is still alive and well. Only the pirates stopped using it.
rodney,
you’re being a bit naive. what happened to Napster after it went legit? Basically it’s now gone and very few people use it. After people found that they had to PAY (boy, that’s a concept that’s sure new!), they all went away.
Now people are using Limewire, Bearshare where they are getting it for free. My point is, once you start charging for content, there will be much fewer people willing to use the program.