Warner Brothers announces that it will sell movies via BitTorrent. That’s good news on many levels: It’s another attempt to take out the middleman (sell your Blockbuster and cable stocks!) It’s a conforming use of P-to-P. And if BitTorrent can be adapted to handle this, I’ll bet it can be adapted to handle advertising and if that happens, networks will run, not walk, to distribute shows online.
This morning, I listened to the latest Diggnation as Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht positively raved about the new ABC pilot of streaming some of its shows for free online (taking out its middlemen — sell the rest of your cable stock). They predicted that if the networks keep doing this, then in three years, more people will watch TV via the internet than via networks. Well, stranger things are happening.
Only thing is, once that happens, the networks themselves are middlemen. How long will it be before Warner Brothers makes shows to sell (or give away with ads) online direct to the audience, without networks or cable or video stores or dvd retailers or movie theaters?
: LATER: I should have said that Warner will distribute both TV and movies.
