Biz & IT —

BitTorrent to Apple: We’ve got porno! Sort of.

BitTorrent's new, legal movie download service is going to be facing a number …

BitTorrent recently announced that it has gone legit with legal movie and television downloads, which the company intends to use to compete with the (many) video download services on the market. Apple is often seen as the current frontrunner in offering video downloads, although the movie selection is still quite lacking, and Xbox Live Video is giving iTunes a good run for its money. BitTorrent's legal movie and TV files will allow users to purchase or rent (in the case of movies) videos using BitTorrent's unique P2P downloading methods but is restricted to one PC and Windows Media DRM, not to mention ISP throttling and no direct-to-TV options yet. Boo.

However, BitTorrent may have one thing going for the service that some of the others don't: softcore porn. Now, this kind of depends upon your personal definition of "softcore," but the service offers a "Mature" section in its movie listings that include such award-winning titles as Party Nerds Toga Bash Heavy Petting Detective, Hollywood Scream Queen Hot Tub Party, The Erotic Dreams of Jeannie, and Every Man's Fantasy. To be fair, these all appear to weigh heavily on the female stars, but I found at least one movie with a man as the main star, along with several women.

Whatever category you consider these salacious titles to fit into, they still fall under the same restrictions as other movies from BitTorrent: most cost $3.99 a pop and they must be viewed within 24 hours of first play button-click. In this case, the "mature" content may not have as much mass appeal after all, since most porn-viewing customers like to keep uh, extra stock around for future use. Plus, it's not like there's much difficulty finding not-so-legit torrent files for not-so-DRMed adult content, either.

That said, perhaps BitTorrent's mature offerings could appeal to more of the average audience who is looking for convenience and speed in finding and downloading files over, well, convenience of use. Could this be BitTorrent's one saving grace (if you could call it that) in light of so many other competing services?

Channel Ars Technica