Digital Distribution & Marketing BitTorrent Bundle the FUTURE?

BitTorrent, a tech company whose name is commonly and incorrectly associated with pirating, has been running a legitimate business since 2004 with over 2 million pieces of licensed content in the BitTorrent download manager, which serves more than 170 million people monthly. The company is now beginning to launch a new endeavor to empower those in the content creation business. BitTorrent Bundle provide a way for creators large and small to have all the advantages of the peer-to-peer protocol while also maintaining control over their content by creating ‘gates’ that must be unlocked by the consumer. We had a chance to chat with Matt Mason, VP of Marketing at BitTorrent, who is very impassioned about what this new publishing platform could potentially mean for creators.

NFS: What are the advantages of peer-to-peer file sharing for entertainment distribution?

Matt: Because the BitTorrent ecosystem is completely distributed, peer-to-peer essentially means you can move really large files without any servers because everybody who is sharing the file is part of the processing power of storing and sending that file. The BitTorrent Bundle is the internet’s media format, it’s a format that works the way the internet works, it’s distributed by nature, it’s designed to be shared infinitely and still add value to content creators, and you can put anything inside a Bundle. It could be high-def or 4K, and you could ship that Bundle to an audience of hundreds of millions for a cost of zero dollars. It’s the most efficient way to move large files around on the internet, that’s what the BitTorrent protocol was designed for. That’s what it does. Every day the BitTorrent protocol already moves more data that everything on HTTP combined. It’s a proven technology and we wanted to build something that allows publishers and content creators to take advantage of that.

The reason Bram our founder invented BitTorrent was: he saw the future and the future was that HTTP which was designed for moving hypertext was just not gonna work for moving videos, music, large code updates — the files are getting bigger and BitTorrent was designed for that as a protocol, and now we’re at the stage that so many content creators want to publish with BitTorrent that we felt it was time to build this format that allows them to do it.