The BEN network

At first I thought BEN was one of those god channels, trying to be a general entertainment channel on SKY, but now, apparently it’s also the BitTorrent Entertainment Network (you see BEN).

BEN is basically an attempt by Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent to go all legit and pull a Napster and the boy seems to be doing pretty good so far.

Unlike other legal video services, he has got a massive range of studios on board - no small feat given the backward, inward looking nature of most major studios.

OK so the movies are only on a rental basis but I personally like that idea - I can rent a movie online that I only intend to watch once or if I really like the movie I can go and buy the DVD.

Maybe Bram could come up with a deal with an online DVD retailer (play.com maybe) where if you rent a movie download and like it you can get a discount on purchasing the DVD of the movie.

The rental isn’t a bad price either at just $3.99 (about £2), they’re also offering TV shows to own for $1.99 which is also pretty good although it is all windows drm.

But, as with pretty much every video download service selling American content I can’t tell you what the quality is like because I’m not allowed to buy it.

I sent an e-mail to the BitTorrent people last night, I already knew the answer I just wanted a quote I could put in my blog post to make it look like I actually do some research instead of talk out of my arse.

“The ability to sell titles to international locations is purely one of distribution rights. While we only have U.S. distribution rights for our content at launch, we hope to add international content over the coming weeks and will add more content all the time.”

So it’s coming then.

The Register have an article on the exact same subject saying pretty much the same thing - this needs to be sorted, we need a way to buy American content online and suggesting that on demand rights should be sold seperatly to traditional distribution rights.

They do get something wrong though. They make this remark at the end of the article “The company claims to begin life with 135 million existing clients, but they will find, that like Napster most of them will move on to the next piracy phenomena, which lately is looking more and more like YouTube.”

First You Tube are removing anything copyrighted quicker than John Prescott after an e-mail saying there are cakes in the kitchen and second You Tube is VERY different to the download concept of BitTorrent.

And a big third is that this doesn’t apply with bittorrent because of the way the technology works. People will just get their torrent files from another site like the massive Pirate Bay and use a different torrent client.

All is not lost for UK content though. Unlike the US model where broadcasters and production companies sell their shows through third parties like Apple and Amazon, our broadcasters are taking a DIY approach - at least for time limited rentals.

You see the UK market is just starting. Here Channel 4, SKY and soon the BBC and ITV will be launching their own applications that will let you download their shows either for free, advertising funded or pay per play and watch them on your computer.

However they’re all time limited at the moment - more pay to rent than pay to keep. The main reason for this is that the indie producers and other copyright holders who retain long term rights to show want to be able to sell them themselves.

So give it a year or so, time for the broadcast extension model to bed in, get people used to watching tv on their computer and then we’ll start to see production companies signing deals with the likes of Apple, Amazon etc to sell their shows for keeps.

As well as Baby Cow, Celador, RDF etc you’ll see shows produced by the BBC, ITV and even, when they get around to it Channel 4 (because they will eventually just say sod off to the indies and make their own shows).

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