Beijing, May 10 (Xinhuanet) -- Warner Bros. announced Tuesday that it will team up with BitTorrent (known as BT), a file-sharing company once known as a bastion of movie and music piracy, to make hundreds of television shows and films available online as low-cost downloads.

    The content available on BitTorrent.com will be protected with digital-rights management (DRM) technology to prevent it from being distributed wholesale on other file-sharing systems once downloaded.

    Initial offerings will include recently released films such as "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" and "Rumor Has It," plus TV shows such as "Babylon 5" and "Dukes of Hazzard."

    Warner Bros. is the first major entertainment company to embrace BitTorrent's distribution system, which has been widely used to illegally swap copies of copyright movies.

    The agreement is also believed to be the first Hollywood distribution deal for any of the file-sharing technology companies, which include eDonkey or Kazaa. Financial terms were not disclosed.

    Plans are for the service to launch in the summer of 2006, at which time it will offer more than 200 movies and TV shows from Warner Bros. The site will offer the option of renting the movies for a limited time or purchasing them as "permanent copies."

    Developed in 2001, BitTorrent's open-source distribution system was designed to help transfer large files over the Internet.

    BitTorrent allows a single file to be broken into small fragments that are distributed among computers. People then share pieces of the content with one another.  Enditem

(Agencies)