BitTorrent Readies Launch of Content Platform

SAN FRANCISCO, October 23: Ashwin Navin, the president and
co-founder of BitTorrent, was at MIPCOM for the first time this year, meeting
with content providers as the company gears up to launch its television and
film download platform. Navin speaks with World Screen Newsflash about transforming the company from a playground for
illegal file-sharers to legitimate player in the digital content market.

Digital distribution was the hot topic for MIPCOM this year,
as traditional media players look for a foothold in a constantly evolving
landscape of new technologies. There were plenty of new-media players on hand
to share their perspectives, including Ashwin Navin, the president and
co-founder of BitTorrent, a San Francisco-based company whose eponymous
software has helped Internet users around the world rapidly download movies,
music and television shows.

Navin is working to take BitTorrent from being a home for
pirates into a one that allows users to easily buy and download content from
around the world to their PCs. That process received a boost earlier this year when
Warner Bros. became the first studio to grant BitTorrent the rights to legally
distribute its content online, and several independent outfits have followed
suit, including Koch Entertainment and Egami Media. “We’re at well over 5,000
titles,” Navin says, “and we’re approaching 10,000 titles. It’s really about
getting a critical mass of content. We need to be competitive with the services
that are owned by the studios or that have deals with all the studios.”

For Navin, attending MIPCOM for the first time, the
reception so far has been positive, and he is still on the lookout for content
that will appeal to BitTorrent’s young, technology-savvy users. “They’re media
enthusiasts, they’re more male than female. We’re trying to program
appropriately. Ultimately our community is going to take over and they’re going
to have a voice within our site.”

Navin continues, “We’ve come up with a model we think
works,” he says. “We’ve done studies on our user base and 33 percent of users
said they’d be willing to pay for video. That’s a phenomenal stat. For Kevin
Tsujihara [the president of the Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group], the
incentive for him was that 5 percent or even 10 percent of our users would sign
on. If we’re looking at numbers closer to a third, we’ll be the biggest online
movie distributor, hands down. It’s up to us to come up with a service that
makes sense, and it’s up to the studios to come up with the economics that
people will want.”

Pricing is, however, a sticking point, Navin notes. “We want
to be the voice of reason,” he says. “We’re hopefully enlightening the studios
that where they think pricing needs to be and what users will actually pay,
there’s a big gap there.”

Navin is also hoping to enlighten the studios on how to
tackle an issue that the studios are particularly concerned about: piracy. “The
goal for us is to come up with a service that gets people that are doing the
wrong thing into doing the right thing,” he says. “It’s incumbent upon us to do
that because we need to get paid, we want to have livelihoods. If people have
behavior patterns that are getting set in, of getting stuff for free, and
they’re doing it because there is no legitimate way to get [that content] at a
reasonable price for the same experience, then we’ve lost the battle.”

Launching the platform in the U.S. this fall is priority
number one, Navin says, with the U.K. earmarked for next year, followed by at
least one Asian market—Japan or China. Later on, BitTorrent is looking to
launch a Spanish-language offering. Eventually, Navin says, BitTorrent aims to
move beyond just being a Windows-based service. “We don’t want to be captive to
any one of these platforms and I don't think the industry needs to be captive
as well,” he says.