BitTorrent Is Now Streaming Movies (With Ads). But Where’s The Good Stuff?
Erick Schonfeld
12 comments »
For anyone who thinks that full-length movies on the Web are for downloading only should check out the Watch Now section on BitTorrent (you will need Flash Player 9 installed). Launched quietly on December 5 using its BitTorrent DNA streaming technology, Watch Now offers a few hundred full-length movies and TV shows that you can watch in full-screen that start a few seconds after clicking play. The quality varies based on the original video, but check out The Ring (original Japanese version) to see what is possible. It is not HD. But it is very watchable.
A clickable pop-up toast ad for Take TV appears at the beginning. The company is experimenting with the frequency of the ads. One pops up between every 5 and 10 minutes. The controls are limited. There is pause/play, restart, volume, and full-screen. No fast-forward or rewind. [Update: I stand corrected. There is a tiny, hard-to-find fast-forward/rewind button that pops up when you hover the mouse over the progress bar].
The technology works. Unfortunately, the pickings are slim. Other than The Ring, there is not much worth watching. They do have Fight Club, but it’s the Bollywood version. (BitTorrent’s such a tease). The TV shows are even more obscure. Wooden Clogs anyone? Deep South Wrestling? I didn’t think so. You are better off sticking to BitTorrent downloads for now.
The Watch Now section is really meant to be a showcase for BitTorrent’s DNA technology. “This is a demonstration for us at this point,” says BitTorrent President Ashwin Navin. He is convinced that ad-supported peer-to-peer streaming is the how video will be delivered in the near future across the Web. ABC or Warner Brothers, for instance, could use it to stream long-form videos from their own sites. (NBC is planning on using P2P software from competitor Pando Networks to stream its video). Navin predicts:
The browser-based video environment is going to get a whole lot better. It makes a closed-off client experience a lot less appealing to the consumer. All of our customers are embracing the browser to deliver videos.
Hmm, a closed-off client experience. Who could that be? Maybe it is time for Joost to finally embrace the browser as well.
Let’s hope they will add some more movies.
Awesome another site to enjoy content on my 42″ LCD…thanks
Yet another watch from US only site. I wonder if any of you guys heard about a company called Moser Baer. After painfully downloading from a pathetic selection(available for India) from Jaman, I happened to find these moserbaer movies for about 80 cents at a neighborhood grocer, 5 minutes walk from my house, they don’t have absolutely latest stuff but for someone like me who doesn’t watch movies often, there were definitely a few very recent movies amongst the selection. If bollywood gets it a bit more (understatement) than hollywood then ‘moserbaerization’ is one luddite answer it can have against the new media.
“No fast-forward or rewind.”
This is not (completely) correct. There is a slider that appears when hovering over the thin progress bar that shows how much of the movie has been buffered/downloaded already. This slider can be used to jump to any position in the (buffered) movie. When the movie is at the very beginning, the slider looks like a little right arrow at the right side just above the play button because the left arrow part of the slider is outside the visible range.
So you can basically do anything you can do in any YouTube or similar embedded video. Pretty neat! Now where is the HD content?
I think it came with ads is fare enough!
So, I wonder if it would be possible to create a protocol that would allow bittorrrent to serve up regular web pages p2p style, just by requesting a web page… Of course, a browser would have to be developed, blah blah blah.
Is that even possible?
I can’t wait until they get a larger selection of movies. Imagen a world where they could release a movie online, for free, with advertisements.
Cool idea, but nothing in there, no movies. i like joox.net which i can’t believe is still around, so many movies it shoulda been taken down a long time ago, and its dvd quality.
“The Good Stuff” in on the real bittorrent P2P network, not “www.bittorrent.com”.
Download and enjoy.
“Watch Now service currently available to U.S. visitors only”
Companies that start off stuck on stupid rarely succeed. Arbitraily slicing off a market the size of California (i.e., Canada) shows incredibly poor business acumen.
Pass.
If they were to release real movies, for free, with ads I wonder what that will do to the Cinema industry?
The movie selections are worse than bad. They are off-putting. What the heck kind of serious audience does BitTorrent expect to attract? The featured movie in their free movie section is a slasher movie advertised by this bloody-mouthed, yellow-skinned model. This is proof that engineers really can’t do marketing.
Like I said in the post, this is intended more as a technology demo than as a full-fledged consumer service.
@Sascha, good catch. I didn’t even see that.