Kate Bulkley: BitTorrent is considered by most content owners, including broadcasters and studios, as a scourge because it encourages the illegal sharing of content. How do you respond to that?
Ashwin Navin: BitTorrent grew because people were using it to publish unlicensed TV shows and music and, big surprise, people like to download TV shows and movies and music, so now we’ve got 80 million people out there that have the software. The idea now is to convert this user base into paying customers. BitTorrent was never specifically designed for the purpose of stealing content, but it was designed to deliver content efficiently, and if we can be a distributor of content using our tools we can be more efficient than all of our competitors. Hopefully that will mean more margin for the publishers and better quality for the consumer.
KB: That sounds good, but a lot of people would say peer-to-peer networks and content protection are oxymorons.
AN: Five years from now we will be laughing about that because every service online uses some kind of peer-to-peer delivery. As file sizes get richer and bigger, P2P is fundamentally the only way to deliver content on the internet without breaking the internet itself. BitTorrent doesn’t get in the way of content protection. It is actually a separate layer.
