Ears On

Warner Bros. will distribute movies and TV shows through BitTorrent, essentially adapting a technology developed for file sharing to legal use. BitTorrent's "file swarming" technique does not download entire files from a central server. Instead it assembles a piece of content using bits from several other computers in an ad hoc network. The company's first step toward respectability came last year, when it removed illegal movie content and links from its site at the, uh, ah, request of the Motion Picture Association of America. Soon you'll be able to file-swarm new movie titles on the same date as the DVD release (price not announced) or TV shows for a buck. The download may either sit on your hard drive temporarily, for a single use, or be backed up to a DVD, though it would still play only on the PC that recorded it. Whether the rules will evolve is uncertain, and no one's given a start date, but the concept seems promising. The studios are already dipping their toes in other forms of digital home distribution.