p2pnet.net News:- You know those online pirates the MPAA, Hollywood’s PR machine, dreamed up and now spends a fortune bad-mouthing?

“This time two years ago, Disney were congratulating themselves at the end of a season that saw lost and Desperate Housewives make it big,” says a post on PaidContent, reporting on Mipcom 2006.

But, it continues, “at the end of the meeting, the head of operations and engineering presented a high-quality, ad-free version of DH that had been put online less than 15 minutes after the programme aired.”

And that, the story has Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney saying, was a “defining moment for the business”.

How so?

“We understand now that piracy is a business model,” she declared. “It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do – through quality, price and availability. We we don’t like the model but we realise it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward.”

This session of Mipcom was “absolutely cracking,” says PaidContent’s Jemima, with a, “really polarised panel – specifically Rick Sands, COO of MGM, leaning way back in his seat away from Bit Torrent co-founder and president Ashwin Navin, just on his left.

“Navin said 35-40 percent of all data on the internet is video, particularly in the past four years since broadband reached a critical mass. BitTorrent has about 8.5 million users and around one million films are downloaded from the service every day.”

And, “Nearly all of that is pirated, says Navin, and the panel shifts uncomfortably in its seats.”

Further down the post, “I’d see it as an amazing opportunity that one million movies are being downloaded on BitTorrent every day – that’s an enormous endorsement not just of the quality content that people want to watch and share, but also of a distribution system that works,” says Jemima, adding:

“When Sands explained that MGM spends a huge amount of money tackling piracy – by putting out fakes, ghost programmes and on DRM solutions – it doesn’t get that money back. Instead, I asked, why not spend that money buying BitTorrent, making it better and then using it to distribute MGM movies? That’s a phenomenal distribution network with a huge audience. He was stumped for a bit, and then said: ‘I’d rather buy Facebook – that’s going to be a great asset. Hard to value what BitTorrent is worth right now. We’re a distributor – we don’t want to be end of the pipe. We create content. Ownership of that type of aggregator and community is further down the end� It is a distribution network, one that right now as a model isn’t very attractive for us. If I can deliver products downstream by virtue of MGM.com than I don’t really have to buy BitTorrent.’

“It’s not such a crazy idea, BitTorrent is launching a legal version and is in negotiations with all the major studios and music labels.”

Amost a year ago, MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) boss Dan Glickman and BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen announced they’d joined forces and Cohen, “confirmed BitTorrent, Inc.’s commitment to removing links that direct users to copies of pirated content owned by MPAA companies” from its site.

Also See:
PaidContent – @ Mipcom: Festival Of The Pirates, October 10, 2006

joined forces – BitTorrent, Hollywood team up, November 22, 2006

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