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First looks: BitTorrent video downloads

Leader: BitTorrent just launched its movie and TV download service. Is it truly easy for an average person to use, and how does it stack up?

BitTorrent joined the masses of legal video download services yesterday with offerings from five movie studios and a handful of TV networks. The service offers movie rentals for $2.99 to $3.99 and TV download-to-own episodes for $1.99 a pop through BitTorrent's already-existing P2P client. Ars took a look at the service on its first day to see how it measures up.

The way that the service is set up is a little different than some of its competitors. Users browse movies and TV shows through BitTorrent's web page instead of through software (like iTunes). This allows them to add a smattering of useful tidbits to the product pages, such as RSS feeds to each studio's movies, email-a-friend links, digg links, and del.icio.us links. Clearly BitTorrent is looking to make it easy to share this information with others and stay on top of what's available.

Searching for movies and shows is simple. The site has a listing of genres down the left side for casual browsing, or the user can search for a specific title using the search box on the site. The files that are downloaded from BitTorrent's website are just torrent files, which can be opened by any BitTorrent client on any platform—however, the movie files that are downloaded are DRMed .wmv files, which means that they can only be played under Windows.

When a user signs up for the service, he or she must enter a credit card and billing information so that purchases can be made quickly and seamlessly. However, when I went to purchase a movie (my first selection was Lady in the Water), BitTorrent refused to believe that I lived in the US. Changing browsers did not alleviate the problem, despite my billing information stating otherwise. Trying to buy another movie (this time Nacho Libre) gave me the same results on two different computers. Another Ars testers in another location did not have that problem, however.

Ironically, I was forced to purchase my movie on the Mac, which had no problems recognizing that I was in the right country. Although the files cannot be played on a Mac, BitTorrent was happy to accept my money anyway, and reminded me that I would only be able to play my movie in Windows. I launched my BitTorrent client and got to downloading. Anyone who's familiar with BitTorrent knows that download speeds can vary a lot depending on how many people are seeding the file at any given time. During my tests, it appeared as if there was never any more than two people seeding any variety of files; my 993MB movie finished in roughly 47 minutes.

I transferred the file to my PC, eager to get my Jack Black fix for the day. However, as if it wasn't frustrating enough that I couldn't buy the movie under Windows, that was just the beginning of my day's troubles. Due to DRM restrictions, BitTorrent specifies that the files require Windows Media Player 10 or higher in order to play the files. I tried to open my protected .wmv file in WMP11, and was met with a curiously vague error message saying that there was a "problem playing the file":

Attempts to open the file on another PC as well as upgrade WMP however I could were fruitless. This file was not opening. Determined to get something to open, I purchased another video from BitTorrent—this time, a TV episode. After completing the 485MB download (in about 25 minutes), I attempted to open it again with WMP11. This time, I was encouraged by the prompt to log in with my BitTorrent account in order to authorize the file.

Once I authorized, I thought I was on my way to video watching nirvana, but that was not the case. As it turns out, the file's usage rights were "not yet valid," according to WMP. Unfortunately, the file's properties were no more descriptive as to when the usage rights would become available.

In the end, I was never able to open either of my two purchased videos. I even transferred the torrent files to the PC and re-downloaded them from there, in hopes that perhaps downloading them on the Mac was messing up the DRM somehow, but I still got the same errors. $5 and too many hours lost, I was media-less and frustrated. The buying experience was a good user experience, and assuming that most people don't experience the trials that I did, any average person could easily use that part of the service. But past that, the user could be delving into the unknown.

It should be important to note, however, that the other Ars tester did not appear to have these problems with the files that he purchased and downloaded. [Some quality stuff from Caesar.]

Without knowing whether browser compatability and dysfunctional video files are a rare occurance or not, it's hard to say whether BitTorrent's service is a good one overall. Regardless of potential problems, however, until BitTorrent can figure out a way to turn this into a download-to-TV service, they're going to be stuck competing with lesser services like CinemaNow and Movielink.