BitTorrent always has something cooking, from a streaming video protocol that never overloads, to a neat little private cloud storage system. Now the company’s invented a new kind of torrent that lets content creators pack their own little store right inside.
When you download a Bittorrent Bundle, you’ll be treated to a chunk of free content. Maybe it’s a video, an album, an indie game, whathaveyou; that part works just like any other torrent. But hidden inside a Bundle is a little store that’s “gated” by the torrent’s owner.
The inaugural bundle, a promo for “Kaskade’s Freaks of Nature” DVD, works like this: download the bundle and you’ll get a free song and a trailer for a documentary. Then, if you offer up your email as a sort of payment, it will unlock some extra concert footage and a promotional “an exclusive digital tour booklet”.
Hopefully this won’t manifest in pirates hiding their Game of Thrones rips behind a Facebook-Like wall, but it’s always nice to see BitTorrent reaching out and offering its awesome protocol to the same content creators that are typically afraid of it. Hopefully the big guys will reach back and give it a fair shake. [BitTorrent Blog]