Quite some time after incorporating (considering they already had a product that worked) BitTorrent Inc has finally started selling content (which was their intention from the start). The real question is: will users follow?

BitTorrent as a technology has a reputation of mainly enabling illegal file swapping. As a developer who analyzed and independently implemented the protocol I can confirm that as a file-exchange mechanism it is very efficient and scales extremely well. Most of the BitTorrent related places on the Internet that I am aware of indeed facilitate swapping of copyrighted material including movies, TV series, console and computer games and software.

Let’s compare for a moment a typical usage scenario for an end user who’d like to watch popular TV shows like “Lost”, “Prison Break” or “24”. If possible, the user would probably like to choose the quality – for HDTV owners the only acceptable choice is HDTV but for analog TV owners smaller files of lesser quality probably suffice. Nobody likes to manually check if the new episode is out, so some kind of RSS feed would be nice. Finally, if the files were not protected by a DRM or similar mechanism and if they could work on Macs and/or Linux machines (and not only Windows) that would be great, too. Awesome if the files could be transcoded and uploaded to an iPod or PSP.

If you’re just a bit Internet savvy, you can find several (illegal) places on the Internet that would offer you all of this.

BitTorrent Inc offers some of the important elements, but not all. For example, they give you the RSS feed of the vendor’s account, not yours (maybe they do, since I’m not in the USA, and the business is still USA only, can’t even check). The files are in WMV format, Windows only and protected by a DRM system. At least for TV series, the episodes are bought and not rented and can be watched on 2 machines at most – but the movies are rented and you only have a limited 24 hour window to watch them on one machine. You can not transfer any content to a portable device. At $1.99 per TV episode and for a level of quality they are offering (481MB per episode, that’s slightly better than the standard illegal rip quality) it is expensive. I won’t even comment on $4.99 per movie rental.

So, I can choose between USA only service with lowish quality DRM Windows only video with no RSS feed and $1.99 per episode or HDTV quality unprotected multi-platform video with RSS updates for free?

There’s one other non-obvious element here – motivation for sharing. BitTorrent is a P2P technology that only works if as many as possible people are uploading for as long as possible. When you download illegal content, you’re getting it for free thanks to the kindness of others so you’re motivated to give back too. Thus most of the BitTorrent clients have a minimal upload/download ratio that each of the downloads will have to achieve. At the same time, due to the way BitTorrent works, it is not efficient to share large number of files simultaneously, so it’s important to prune the download list. You need to balance these two things, uploading as much as you can without hurting your overall download speeds.

When you pay to BitTorrent there’ s no moral obligation whatsoever. You paid for the damned things and you don’t care how much you’ll upload. You will upload during the download due to the nature of the protocol, but as soon as you’re done, there’s zero incentive to keep uploading – why would you donate your upload bandwidth to BitTorrent Inc – you paid already, didn’t you? I don’t see how is BitTorrent going to manage this problem. If the point of P2P distribution is that it simplifies the distribution for content producers lowering the prices for the users, I don’t see that in practice. The content is too expensive and the model does not motivate users to share, which made the distribution model theoretically cheap in the first place.

P2P has its uses, but for selling content? I don’t think so.