BitTorrent’s Bram Cohen

April 2007

By Mansha Daswani

Just two years ago, BitTorrent was the bane of Hollywood. The peer-to-peer file-sharing software developed by Bram Cohen in 2001 became, for some time, the easiest way to rapidly download film and television content online—albeit illegally. The technology gained millions of fans shortly after its launch, soon accounting for more than a third of all data sent over the Internet. In 2004, Cohen teamed up with former Yahoo! executive Ashwin Navin to turn the free software into a legitimate business model, and this year, the BitTorrent Entertainment Network went live, offering content from Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox and MTV Networks, among others, on a download-to-own and download-to-rent basis.

WS: What was your intention when you developed the software?

COHEN: I had been working in startups for a long time, and the last one I worked at ran out of money in early 2001. I had a bunch of ideas for interesting stuff. I didn’t have all that much of a plan per se, I just wanted to make a really compelling application. BitTorrent was founded under a very simple calculation of, there’s plenty of upload capacity out there that’s not being utilized, how do I go about utilizing it? I worked on it, living off of credit cards, for quite a long time. It really took off in early 2003 and we founded the company in 2004 and raised some venture-capital money and started the real operation. It had gotten a huge amount of usage and a very large chunk of all Internet traffic before the company was even founded. It was a really useful tool to deliver really big files to lots of people. It was the only game in town.

WS: Were you surprised by how quickly it took off?

COHEN: Yes and no. No, because on paper it looked like it should. Yes, because you don’t expect those things to happen in real life.

WS: What are you most proud of in terms of the work you’ve done on the software?

COHEN: The initial thing I did was that there was this very difficult logistical problem of how do you use the bandwidth of peers who don’t trust each other and might go away at any time? It wasn’t even clear if that was a solvable problem, but I solved it. More recently, we got out of what was a very scary legal situation, where lots of people were predicting we’d be sued into oblivion and I’d be thrown into jail. Now we’re working with Hollywood and bringing a lot of their content online and really preparing them for the inevitable shift of everything to being done online. The traditional television model is going away as Internet capacity increases and the limitations of the old medium [are eliminated.]

WS: How has the reception been so far to the BitTorrent Entertainment Network?

COHEN: The reception from users has generally been quite positive. If you read the reviews on our site, they tend to say, this has a lot of [content] on it and it’s easy to use and the videos are high quality. But a lot of the reviewers are extremely sensitive to there being DRM [digital rights management software, which limits the number of devices a piece of content can be played on, to make it harder to pirate]. User reception has strongly indicated that users do know what DRM is and object to its presence at all.

iTunes has the advantage of controlling the whole system end to end, so if all you do with a piece of content is use it in on your iTunes player [and your iPod], people don’t tend to think too much about the DRM involved—it’s all pretty seamless.

When someone [downloads] something onto their computer, they have these expectations about what they can do with it, [the same expectations they have when] buying DVDs. DVDs don’t have any real DRM on them, and people are used to being able play them [on a computer] and keep them when they get a new computer and play them on their DVD player.

WS: Why are your films on a download-to-rent basis, as opposed to download to own?

COHEN: We’re very concerned about prices and we really want to limit the amount of EST (electronic sell-through) that we do until we can get prices that we think won’t cause sticker shock among our general user base. [We think] $9.99 is the target [price].

WS: And you are making room for user-generated content?

COHEN: Yes, we are going to make our site available as a general publishing platform where anyone can publish their own content and have use of the same monetization vehicles as our major studio partners do.

WS: Do you have plans for BitTorrent outside of the U.S.?

COHEN: We’re working on making our store available to international customers. We would love to make everything available everywhere, but it’s a whole different set of licensing [issues]. So we’re going to make everything available that we can in every place that we can, but a lot of our licenses are U.S. only, unfortunately.