Hollywood, BitTorrent Reach Agreement. (MPAA could you define agreement for me?)

So yesterday morning I read about an announcement that would be coming later in the day in a press release about an agreement between Bram Cohen ( of BitTorrent) and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association). I was immediately filled with the hope, (I can never hold my optimism back), that the movie industry was finally realizing what the music industry had figured out over a year ago. That being that people want to be able to on demand access, download and watch/listen to all media for a reasonable price. I was looking forward to a statement such as “Bram will remove links to pirated movies from the BitTorrent search engine and in return the MPAA has selected Bram to lead the development of licensed distribution of movies over the internet”. I was practically giddy.

Then came the announcement. Which was only half what I hoped for and really the half I really did not care about. The announcement was (translated through my bull shit filter, to get the truth) “We have made Bram remove links to pirated movies on his search engine and in return we are going to dangle this carrot in front of him until he figures out he will never get it.”

Of course my optimism cannot really be held out of this conversion. I do think that it is possible for the industry to do right by us. The MPAA as an organization that represents many other organizations may actually just need time to approve plans with all of its member studios. It may actually be that in the near future we will be learning about the new plans to improve movie link with BitTorrent technology

Movie Link will not become useful in any way just by adding BitTorrent. The hope, or at least my hope, is that it will decrease their costs to a point that they can provide a service with value. Just looking at the front page of movie link I can see that I can rent “Rock School” for $4.99, that’s not cheaper than Block Buster, and it is not even a new release. Then we look at RedBox, I can drive 3 blocks to the nearest Mc Donald’s and rent “War of the Worlds” for $1.00. So for about the same investment in time I can have a new release for $1.00. And finally I would like to mention Stars Online from Real Media. Here I pay a low monthly fee, get a better selection of movies that Movie Link and I can play them immediately, the releases are not quite as fresh as RedBox but far fresher than Movie Link.

Ultimately the Movie industry and the MPAA seem to be looking into how the online world affects their business but, I don’t believe that any one in the industry realizes how far behind they are. I hope what ever the industry is offering Bram that he will be able to lead them to an offering that we as consumers actually want.