BitTorrent Bubbles Up

But BitTorrent did announce that it had reached licensing deals for movies and television shows from the likes of News Corp.'s (NWS Quote) 20th Century Fox, Lions Gate Entertainment and Viacom properties such as Paramount Pictures and its Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and MTV cable networks.

That news follows earlier licensing deals with Time Warner's (TWX Quote) Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and several smaller studios.

It's easy to read about those licensing deals and be skeptical. After all, the same studios have inked agreements with other companies, notably Amazon and its undead Unbox offering, with little impact. And Napster tried to negotiate with the big media companies before it was shut down.

But much of BitTorrent's popularity is due to its ability to break the download bottleneck. Rather than load a file from a single server to any and all PCs that want it, BitTorrent's software divides up a file so that users essentially download it from each other. Not only is BitTorrent faster and less taxing on bandwidth resources, it's also cheaper than conventional downloading.

So, if Internet users have taken to the grainy 10-minute videos on YouTube, imagine how they'd feel about downloading high-quality, full-length movies.

The other obstacle preventing widespread adoption of video downloading is the restrictions placed on using them -- many can't be played on a DVD player and some, unlike a standard DVD, expire after a few viewings. It seems like BitTorrent may start off with similar restrictions, but if consumers give in to common sense and object, this will probably end soon enough.