paul boutin says operating bittorrent "feels like launching a mission to mars." he and this post both ignore what makes bittorrent and other P2P work - it's economical to distribute data for free when everybody's serving. distributing movies centrally scales badly. rumors have it that the other critical part of the upcoming itunes scheme is a built-in bandwidth sell-back feature - seamless BT - earning participating users coupons or something.

the answer that P2P participants have come up with (helping install the acquisition and playback software, then offering one-stop "web 2.0" sites which gather and sometimes rate available data streams) might not be elegant but there's no question it's generating a lot of traffic, maybe more than anything else on the net, other than spam. the technology works. with respect, for windows users, BT is an easier technological road to follow than the operating system itself.

Even granting you the ease-of-use argument, chirp (which I hesitate to do to some extent because BT is an alien experience for many of the sort of people who'd want to watch mainstream movies quickly and easily without having to learn anything new, whereas Apple's iTunes interface is immediately intuitive and familiar), the question ultimately boils down to who's got the goods and into what sort of system are they willing to market them through. And just like the record companies, the studios are never going to feel comfortable about releasing their wares into any sort of P2P system they feel they can't track.

Don't get me wrong; I'm as suspicious of what Apple may be up to as anyone at Boing Boing. But even having launched their own digital delivery systems and watching them flounder, the studios recognize a proven model in iTunes. When they cut their deals, I think that this is going to be the tipping point. Alternative systems may crop up, as they have with music; but this'll be the point at which the majority begins looking at acquiring, storing and viewing movies as differently as they have looked at acquiring, storing and listening to music since iTunes launched - and quickly nabbed 80 percent of downloaded music market share.

it's scale that's the issue though. the itunes store has 80% of the seal-of-approval music download market. a good store interface, a good application, a good music player. but of the total "market," is the formal market's share even 10%? the itunes store is clearly built atop the ipod/itunes success at dominating P2P usership.

studio comfort is hard to call relevant. unless they're going to boycott their own customers. what's your guess at how much material on your average nextgen video ipod will be seal-of–approval data? half? or less. people still seem to feel that the price of the ipod or PSP itself is equivalent to a user fee for media available on the network. plus - if you own the data or have legal-ish access to it, paying for the official rip looks stupid no matter if it's one-click shopping. pay, or put in the time to learn the "other" software and save yourself some money.

i don't think anything is stable on this. for the media companies to have a strong position, they basically need most potential customers to have fiber hookups at home and then, giant user participation in resharing. movies (and music) encoded at bit rates possible at current network speeds and storage restrictions aren't a good buy. building the price into network access works better.

and also it's been pointed out that maybe the seal-of-approval market's growth is fake. if you chart the itunes store's new download business to apple's units sold on ipods, it looks pretty close. meaning probably people get a couple of songs from itunes when they get their new shiny toy then start looking for more affordable options. and that the ipod's popularity as a general music player (-slash-accessory) has to be adjusted out of the data before getting excited about click-buy-watch, or you end up thinking you're looking at a formal market revolution when it's really a brilliant aftermarket revenue strategy by apple.

(obligatory mention of various near future industrial-world-crippling catastrophic scenarios involving oil, clouds, what-have-you making media rights a minor question.)

you end up thinking you're looking at a formal market revolution when it's really a brilliant aftermarket revenue strategy by apple.

This is an excellent point, one of many you've brought up in just two comments. Here's where I should probably admit, whispering, that I currently have nearly 6500 songs stored in iTunes and have bought exactly one from the actual iTunes music store. What can I say; 99 cents is a lot of money for one damn song. And no (whispering a bit louder now), I haven't "stolen" all those others, by the way; they primarily come from "samples," distributed via Epitonic, Salon's Audiofile and the like, plus my own CDs, bought back in the days when I was still buying CDs, and yes, a few gray areas, too, but nothing (or very little) out-n-out criminal.

Back to the point, though. We're beginning to talk about two different things at the same time: the ideal distribution model, which you have a much better handle on than I do, in terms of what it would actually look like; vs the model we're probably going to end up with.

Two very different things. This second model is all about perception. Again, in the case of music, there was a stand-off between two parties, between sellers and buyers. Apple came up with a model that met sets of demands from both parties and, for the time being, the deal was sealed. As in the field of international diplomacy, a lot of what goes into treaties is about saving face, declared principles and so on rather than what's of actual, concrete, real benefit to all sides.

The studios want their movies in the wires. They see DVD sales plateau-ing and they're hungry for another way to repurpose those libraries all over again. Everything they've tried so far is nowhere near as sexy-cool as what's been going on with music ever since iTunes/iPod caught on. What's more they know that their target demographics - not the movie geeks and not the geek geeks - have not been interested at all in downloading movies in any way shape or form and won't be until the idea comes at them in a form they recognize and are already comfortable with.

At the same time, this in-a-better-world model you're describing, well, that'll probably be going on as well, but talked about a lot less. What the RIAA and the MPAA have to accept (and actually, they do; they just have to admit they do) is that long before media went digital, for every album sold, umpteen copies were made; for every VHS copy of a movie sold, there were umpteen families passing it around. The radio was the source of countless mixed tapes and, as anyone who's seen Xan Cassavetes's Z Channel knows, a tribe of young Tarantinos were learning about the history of cinema from dupes.

And yet money was still being made hand over fist. Now I'm talking like the idealist, but the studios and record companies need to actually smile on acceptable levels of sharing. I've argued again and again in the past that nearly every generation but teenagers had lost all interest in what was going on in contemporary music until Napster came along and revived that interest and actually encouraged listeners to explore heretofore uncharted territories.

But this is really digressing now. The point: when this deal happens, it will be, for a large and significant number of affluent movie fans, a breakthrough in terms of perception of the very idea of getting movies any other way besides going to a theater or buying or renting a DVD.

Meanwhile, Scott Kirsner's found some interesting news as to why negotiations between Apple and the studios might not be best described as, oh, going smoothly.