BitTorrent plans to open an online movie store to sell foreign films and other hard to find video, including content from China, Japan and India.
The service will not compete with other movie download sites such as the Unbox store launched by Amazon.com last week, nor Apple’s iTunes, which offer mainstream shows. Instead, BitTorrent plans to market content users want but have a hard time finding, such as Bollywood movies and shows based on Japanese Manga comics.
“We needed a niche, so we plan to offer content no one else is using,” said Ashwin Navin, president and a co-founder of BitTorrent, in an interview.
The service will launch in the United States by year-end, and could help open up the country to foreign film and TV shows. Outside of larger cities in the United States, foreign content is hard to find, requiring many people to download such content from the Internet.
BitTorrent will launch the service in the United Kingdom early next year and then continue to expand globally.The company will use its file-sharing software on the Web site for fast, secure delivery of movies and other shows, which will be compliant with digital rights management.
In May, BitTorrent inked a deal with Warner Bros. to use its Internet file sharing software to deliver some movies. In the same month, the company entered talks with several Hong Kong and Chinese movie studios about offering its file sharing software for legal movie distribution of Chinese language films.
