BitTorrent Store? That won’t work…

BitTorrent launched a new P2P digital media store, and when you think about it, that’s a really bad idea. Why? Well, I’ll tell you why.

Who Uses BT?
Who exactly uses BitTorrent? That could probably summed up in “people not wanting to pay for what they’re downloading”. Sure, you can download perfectly legal things, like podcasts, freeware, etc… but what do you use torrents for? I use it for music, software and other miscilanneous goods that I don’t want to pay for. So why give me a store where I have to pay for me free stuff?

Who makes BT?
This is more looking at torrenting as a whole, but any torrent site is made up of the users who contribute to it. So who’s going to make up the BT Store? It’s not the users because they are supposedly legit here, but how can they support something that lists DRM’d (that’s another thing…) movies for like $4 a pop, when on the same site you can download it free, and unencrypted.

They will be selling movies and TV show episodes to start, and at rates of $3.99 for freshly released movie, $1 cheaper for older ones, and $1.99 per episode of TV shows.

First of all, movies are probably the easiest thing in the world to obtain pirated, and TV shows are pretty damn easy as well. Dailymotion anyone? Next, what is this going to do to BitTorrent? To make this legal P2P thing work, they’re going to have to remove all said buy-able content from their free torrent listings, or better yet, pay for membership. Either one will drive their users to another torrent site, TorrentSpy and MiniNova and PirateBay are always looking for new exclusive users, I would imagine, however there’s probably some DB sharing going on somewhere.

Lastly, the person who uses torrents to start is reasonably tech-literate, and the person the BitTorrent website and this whole idea seems to be marketed to is the opposite.