It was almost a year ago when BitTorrent's creator Bram Cohen announced he was going legit. Several months later, the company announced deals with movie studios. At the time, I was wondering where the movies were? Well, if you go to BitTorrent today, you still can't find movies to buy, but I'd assume they're still coming. In the meantime, the company has cleared an important hurdle. Today, it announced a deal with hardware makers Asus, Planex and QNap, to build routers, media servers and network storage devices with BitTorrent software already integrated.

This is a big deal for a couple of reasons. First, one big problem with downloading and uploading files using BitTorrent is the extreme stress it puts on a router. Friends of mine have burned out a number of routers using the software, and have to dial down the number of outgoing and ingoing connections when downloading large files. A router designed to handle the immense workload BitTorrent transfers require without crashing or needing to be reset will fill a need. Probably the biggest selling point of these products will be that they don't need a PC to run the BitTorrent client, the software is housed directly on the device and can download without tying up a user's PC.

The deals are in place, now the hardware is coming to market to make BitTorrent a viable digital movie marketplace, so where are the movies Mr. Cohen? It's about time for BitTorrent to realize its potential. If that happens, maybe the mental image associated with the name BitTorrent won't be that of pirates swapping copyrighted files under the radar anymore. — Brian Ward

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Technorati tags: bittorrent, file sharing.