BitTorrent and Joost team up to spice legal downloads

There was a time when the P2P phenomenon, pioneered by avant-garde tech companies like BitTorrent caused most music industry execs plenty of heartaches and sleepless nights. After years of condemnation and a multitude of legal tussles, former bad-boys like Napster and BitTorrent have since changed ways and joined forces with the top entertainment companies.
Through the BitTorrent Entertainment Network (BEN), BitTorrent is now courting past detractors like Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, MGM, MTV and LionsGate to sell legal movies and TV shows downloads. The service will retail TV shows at $1.99 per download and rent movies at $3.99 for new titles ($2.99 for old titles). They are also promising to include High-definition video and Japanese anime to their stable. To add to this, the media content will be protected by Windows Media DRM, in a bid to stem illegal downloads and file-swapping. At the moment, Tinsel town bigwigs are very cautious with this idea of freely distributing films and TV shows over the internet. Especially when using P2P networks, taking into consideration the upsurge experienced in the past.
BitTorrent have now succeeded in striking this remarkable deal with the who’s who in the entertainment business. Aren’t they joining an already crowded arena? We have seen Apple TV, The unbox Amazon on TiVo deal, Walmart stores, CinemaNow and MovieLink among others. What will make them stand out? President and Co-founder of BitTorrent Ashwin Navin says that BEN will go beyond offering downloads of movies, TV shows, videos and games. BEN is planning on enhancing community building where users can post their own media content and make it available for download. This is seen as a noble way for independent filmmakers to gain exposure by distributing their own content. Besides, BitTorrent are not going it alone. They have teamed up with Joost (from the creators of Kazaa and Skype) to improve user experience. Joost, which is currently under test, specializes in ad-supported video streaming. Joost has a greatly enhanced service that features high-quality video display and the incorporation of customized widgets or plug-ins on the video screen to improve user-interactivity. Furthermore, Joost has an army of reputable content-providers namely Warner Music Group (WMG), MusicNation and Viacom. In addition to this, BitTorrent has the numbers (135 million) to give their competitors plenty of food for thought. It is also a given fact that both BitTorrent and Joost use P2P technology, their download speeds are unmatched and is less likely to be bothered by overwhelming user demand. It is for these reasons that this partnership is well poised to tackle the budding download industry with few hiccups.