Before you see the new Colin Firth movie Arthur Newman in theaters on April 26, you can watch it on BitTorrent. Of course, you can do that with pretty much any movie these days; the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol has more than 170 million members who collectively offer up a bottomless well of pirated media. But for this movie, about a former professional golfer and Fedex employee who assumes a new identity after faking his death, it’s actually part of the official marketing roll out.
Los Angeles-based film distributor Cinedigm has partnered with BitTorrent to promote Arthur Newman by releasing its first seven minutes for free. Of course, seven minutes of a movie isn’t very much—it’s basically an extended trailer. But Cinedigm is hoping that you’ll be so enamored by Colin Firth’s bumbling eccentricities and Emily Blunt’s sullen expressions that you’ll buy a movie ticket and see the film in the theaters.
“It’s a promotional play on one of the biggest platforms,” Jill Calcaterra, the chief marketing officer at Cinedigm, wrote to Bloomberg Businessweek in an email. “We are simply taking the way [BitTorrent] has been used in the past and turning it on its head.” In that sense, Cinedigm’s marketing move is a turning point for the industry—not unlike going into business with the guy who stole all your lunch money in middle school.
Ever since BitTorrent was launched in 2001 by a computer programmer named Bram Cohen, it’s had a contentious relationship with old media. Unlike digital piracy’s forefathers such as Napster and Limewire, BitTorrent has never been declared illegal. It doesn’t connect people to their desired download, it just helps them figure out where to find it. And it does have a lot of legal content too— more than 2 million files, in fact. But a 2011 study by piracy monitoring company Envisional found that 64% of BitTorrent’s traffic—which accounts for about 11% of all Internet traffic—came from people downloading non-pornographic copyrighted material. According to the website TorrentFreak, over 200,000 people have reportedly been sued for copyright infringement in recent years, usually by downloading things using the BitTorrent protocol. (That number is a couple years old; the current total is likely much higher than that.) In 2010, Voltage Pictures filed a lawsuit against what would ultimately grow to more than 24,500 people for illegally downloading The Hurt Locker on BitTorrent.
The service, while a movie producer’s worst nightmare, is also a marketing dream: in terms of demographics, nearly half of BitTorrent users are over 18 but under age 35, and 64% are male. What’s more, studies have shown that people who pirate movies and music online also buy more movies and music than the average person. A 2012 American Assembly study puts the increased purchases at around 30%, which more or less fits with Bit Torrent’s self-assessment; the company claims its users buy a third more albums and DVDs than most people. (Makes sense, right? If you’re downloading a pirated copy of Paul Blart: Mall Cop, you probably watch a lot of movies—sometimes even in the theaters).
Cinedigm isn’t the first to try and harness the powers of BitTorrent as a vast marketing vehicle. Last year, when they were promoting a new album, Counting Crows released bonus songs, liner notes and other material on BitTorrent to promote their tour. “Counting Crows were able to upgrade their entire European tour to stadium level because they could prove they had the audience through their BitTorrent campaign,” says Mason. Similarly, musicians are increasingly warming up to the idea of streaming their albums for free on iTunes and Spotify, and now film studios are following suit with Netflix, Amazon and BitTorrent. Sure, Cinedigm is only giving you seven minutes of Colin Firth, but that’s more or less the equivalent of a record company agreeing to release one album track for free.
For BitTorrent, the partnership with Cinedigm is a step toward legitimacy, part of an image overhaul to have people view it as an actual technology company, based in San Francisco, with over 100 real employees and not, as Mason puts it, “this amorphous thing that only exists online.”
“It’s funny,” he says, “the first time I met [Erik Klinker] the CEO of BitTorrent, I said, ‘Wait you have a CEO? I thought you were a software protocol, not a company.”
