Studio Sees Profit in What Was Piracy
Extending Hollywood's tradition of converting enemies to allies into the digital age, Warner Bros. today is expected to announce plans to use file-sharing technology to distribute movies and television shows online.
By the summer, BitTorrent Inc. will allow users to download and watch "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," "Natural Born Killers," "Dog Day Afternoon," "The Dukes of Hazzard" and other Warner Bros. titles on their computers.
The agreement marks a shift in the entertainment industry's attitude toward online file sharing, which enables users to make the music, movies and TV shows stored on their hard drives available to millions of people worldwide.
Just last year, Warner Bros. and other studios won a bitter U.S. Supreme Court fight against file-sharing networks that had turned a blind eye to pirating. But as they did with home video a generation ago, the studios are embracing new forms of file sharing as a way to reach new audiences and boost revenue.
"The problem of piracy is getting worse, not better," said Kevin Tsujihara, president of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group, the unit working with BitTorrent. "The way we're positioning this within Warner Bros. is, let's take the problem and turn it into an opportunity. If we can convert 5, 10 or 15% of these users into legitimate customers, we think it can have a significant impact."
That's what Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes store has done for the music industry. Its simple interface, 99-cents-a-song pricing and integration with the popular iPod player have helped transform many content-hungry computer users from pirates to paying customers, said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner. Apple is now bringing the same approach to TV shows at iTunes.
BitTorrent, in contrast, is still hard to use for nontechies.
"ITunes converted people who were doing downloads illegally into legal users," Weiner said. "It's got to be as simple as what Apple is doing. That's the standard that's being set."
The Motion Picture Assn. of America has sued users of BitTorrent's software who shared illegal film copies online. But the software's creators have long said they wanted to help, not hurt, the entertainment industry by delivering huge video files quickly and inexpensively.
Warner said Monday that the San Francisco software company had satisfied piracy concerns by removing links to illicit copies of the studio's content from the BitTorrent search engine and incorporating strong anti-copy protections.
